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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is episode 203 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

Craig: You know, I’m doing quite well. I’m in the strange screenwriter summer place where my children seem to be off of work. I’m not off of work but I feel like I should be off of work. In fact, I think I have more to do now than I did before. I don’t think we ever outgrow the feeling that summer is supposed to be not-work time.

John: Yes. I had the week-long vacation which really felt like my summer break but I’m definitely now back into it. And I’m in to this rewrite and figuring out how to actually execute those things. I said, “Oh, yeah, sure. I can do that.” And then you stare at the scenes and figure out, “Oh, my god, how am I going to do that?”

Craig: Isn’t that the worse feeling when you think to yourself in the moment, “Oh, you know what, there is an easy path there.” And then after maybe five more minutes of private consideration you realize, “Oh, no, no. Oh, no, no.” But it’s too late.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’ve said it was easy.

John: You already said yes.

Craig: Yeah, I know it’s terrible.

John: Yeah. And the challenges are, in general, I could do all those things but to do all those things without adding pages is incredibly difficult. So you’re looking at sort of how to make these changes work in a way that makes everything better and doesn’t drag stuff out. And I think I can really do that in this pass, but it’s just taken some really careful brain time to do it.

Craig, I don’t know if you ever do this thing called Morning Pages? Have you heard this idea of Morning Pages?

Craig: No.

John: No. So I think I’m probably doing it wrong and I’ll probably explain it wrong. But it’s the idea that the first thing when you wake up in the morning, you go and you write down the stuff that your day is about or the stuff that you’re going to be working on that day and it’s meant to be a way to focus your brain and focus your attention. And I think there’s probably a philosophy that I’m not executing quite correctly. But this last week I tried it.

And so, every morning I’ve been waking up and before I go downstairs and drink my coffee, I’ll just spend a few minutes scribbling down sort of what this stuff is that I’m writing that day. And it has been useful, I think, in terms of focusing on what I’m actually going to do and what the scene work will be for that. And so, some of the solutions I found this week have come out of that. So, if people are looking for a new thing to try, that might be the new thing to try.

Craig: I do a similar thing but I usually do it right before I go to bed. Because I find that if I have some clarity about what the next days’ accomplishments are supposed to be, it’s a lot easier for me to go to sleep. I feel comforted. I think, okay, I have a plan.

If I go to bed without any concept of what the next day is going to be, sometimes, I toss and turn. I’m a little worried. When I wake up I can just start to do those things, of course, as you know, I will use the shower as the shower.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Get it?

John: The shower is the shower of revelations for how you’re going to get things done.

Craig: Don’t anyone ever tell me I’m not clever.

John: Uh-uh-uh.

Craig: I changed a vowel sound.

John: Yeah, no one will ever tell you that you’re not clever.

Craig: [laughs].

John: They’ll never tell you that you’re not clever.

Craig: Everyone is thinking it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So let us get to the work for today which is we were going to talk about what turnaround is and how it works. You know what, it’s possible we discussed turnaround on a previous episode, but if we have, it’s been so long ago that you and I don’t even remember what turnaround is.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So we’re going to have a Professor Craig explanation of what turnaround is.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: We’re also going to answer a bunch of leftover questions from the live 200th episode. That was a fun time where we had people writing their questions, you know, listening to the show in real-time, sending in their thoughts and their questions. We were able to answer maybe five of them on the air, but we had a lot of them leftover.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So Stuart gathered them together and we’re going to try to blow through a bunch of them today.

Craig: Great.

John: So, it should be a fun episode.

But first we have some follow up. In the last week’s episode, we discussed a site called FAST Screenplays and our opinion of it to summarize was not high. And we did not think it was necessarily a site to which people should be paying money. Craig had the opportunity this week to do some follow up and conversations with the owner of the site and the program, Jeff Bollow. So do you want to summarize what that entailed?

Craig: Yeah, well, Jeff contacted both of us on Twitter publicly so everybody could see that that’s there and essentially and then followed up with an email saying, “Hey, you know, I feel like I’ve been misunderstood here and actually I’d love a chance to explain to you what I’m doing. I think you will agree that it is a positive thing and it really is worth $30,000,” and et cetera.

And before we decide how we’re going to deal with this, I did have one question for him. Because the thing that was bothering me I suppose the most, the thing that stood out the most that was setting FAST Screenplays apart from a lot of the other sites that we get angry about was that he was claiming it was not-for-profit. And so I asked him if in fact his company and I wasn’t sure if his company was Australian or American, if it was recognized by any relevant taxation authority as a not-for-profit or non-profit company and he wrote us back and said, “Actually, no, it’s not.”

And what he said is that he never intended to imply that it was a legitimate charity, you know, or a non-profit organization the way we understand them to be in the legal sense. He wasn’t even aware that that was possibly something that he could be misleading about, but he understands now that that is misleading and so he apparently has taken that description off of the website. So, at least, there was a positive development.

You know, I’m not sure how to go about this with him because on the one hand I do feel like anybody that we suggest is not being, hmm, let’s say, ultimately useful for the good and welfare of screenwriters should have a chance to defend themselves or rebut or explain. On the other hand, I’m concerned about just giving him our venue as a platform to promote his program. I don’t want to do that either because, frankly, I have no interest in that. So I’m not sure how to proceed here.

What’s your instinct, John?

John: My instinct is to do sort of exactly what we just did in this last 30 seconds which is to explain that there was a conversation and that some things were said, but, you know, it’s up to other people in their own venues to figure out the ways to respond and that it’s not our place to offer an open-mic to anybody who feels offended.

Craig: Well, I think that that settles that. I mean, I do think that he is obviously — he can go ahead and sort of put his own rebuttal up on his website. I was glad that we cleared up the non-profit issue. That was the thing that was really sticking out to me. But, yeah, I agree with you. I think — and, you know, we’ll respond to him but, you know, he was offering to explain his system to us and how it works. I just I’m not interested in that. I don’t —

John: I’m not interested either.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s a podcast about things that are interesting to screenwriters, notably us, and that was not particularly interesting to me.

Craig: We’re not interested in it therefore it will not be on our podcast about things that are interesting to us.

John: You and I both got a tweet from a person named Matt Treacy who writes, “Curious whether you guys actually do any genuine research or contact individuals before assassinating their character.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: And I do want to clear this up because we do a lot of research and people may not realize that part of the funds that we’re getting from the subscriptions is to hire private investigators to sort of really do the leg work and the field work to make sure that it’s possible for us to really, you know, know what we’re talking about. So it may just seem like we’re just two guys standing at microphones talking once a week but there’s really a whole crack research team behind this whole thing. And, you know, sometimes, you know, the ethical calls that we get into, it’s sort of like an Aaron Sorkin show where there’s a lot of back and forth, Craig and I are arguing before we get on the air but that we really have all the facts exactly right and straight. And I hope that comes across in our weekly banter.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, look, we sit down every week and we pick from a list of people who we feel deserve to be assassinated. And then we have, yes, a lot of times we’re yelling at each other, “But are you sure? Are you sure?” No, we’re not in the business of character assassination. We read a guy’s website and we commented on it. I think probably that’s a friend. I assume that’s a friend.

John: I think it may be a friend.

Craig: I think it might be a friend. I don’t think that friend is doing his friend any favors with that kind of thing. I mean, no, we’re not interested in character assassination. We are interested in protecting, as I said before, the good and welfare of screenwriters in general. Anybody that’s looking to make a buck off of screenwriters ought to be able to face this kind of critique. And considering that I basically start from a default position of don’t spend money on your screenwriter career, is it really that shocking that I had a problem with that?

John: Nothing is shocking to me anymore, Craig.

Our next bit of follow up is Tess Gerritsen who has a lawsuit in the works against the film Gravity. So we first talked about this in a full-length dedicated episode. It’s episode 183. And so I think it’s time for a little bit of Game of Thrones sort of previously on Scriptnotes so we can actually get all up to speed because it’s really complicated. So I’ll try to do the short version of this.

So previously in the Gravity legal drama, novelist Tess Gerritsen writes a book called Gravity. She sells the film rights to Newline for $1 million with additional payments due if they make the movie. Alfonso Cuarón makes a movie called Gravity for Warner Bros which is a giant hit. Gerritsen says, “Hey, wait, that movie is based on my book.” Warner says, “Nah-uh. It isn’t. And even if it were, the movie rights are owned by Newline and we own Newline so there’s no issue here.”

Gerritsen sues. She wants the money she feels that she’s owed and also a discovery basically, ability to do research within Warner Bros, so she can establish that Warner and Newline are deliberately trying to screw her out of the money.

So the judge here was Judge Margaret Morrow and she said basically, “Nope, you haven’t made a compelling case.” But she gave Gerritsen’s legal team an opportunity to revise their complaint to address the nature of the corporate relationship between Warner and Newline and that’s where we left it last February.

So in the meantime, it turns out Gerritsen’s legal team did file their amended complaint and Judge Morrow this past week came back and said basically again, “Nope.” And so we’ll put a link in the show notes to the actual like 50 or 60-page legal document that came out of it, like, Gerritsen’s opinion. But I’ll tell you, it’s one of the most boring legal documents I’ve ever gone through and I’ve gone through a bunch, because it’s only really looking at the nature of the corporate relationship between Warners and Newline and it’s just eye-glazingly boring in terms of what is the difference between a merger and an acquisition and a stock thing.

Craig: Right.

John: And, I don’t know, Craig, did you try to pile through it?

Craig: Yeah, yeah, I tried. You’re exactly right. What’s happened here is that Gerritsen’s case which the moral core of it is, “Hey, you ripped off my book.” And she also alleges that she did some writing on the screenplay that was developed of her book directly which was written by Michael Goldenberg, not the Cuaróns. The moral core, you rip me off, that’s been discarded. At this point now it’s just been drifting to this whole other thing of, “Hey, these are the same companies and so I should automatically…”

It’s very much now about the relationship between these companies. And so, naturally, the ensuing legal decision is as boring as that topic. And I couldn’t finish it because, as you said, it was eye-glazingly tedious. But the upshot is that the judge enlisting multiple cases and all that other stuff just said, “No, no, you’re done.”

John: Yeah, it feels like the whole thing was like one giant parenthetical. It was all like, you know, half of a page would be sort of parenthesis about all these other cases. And so, it was really hard to get through.

One of the key phrases that’s in here is “breach of implied covenant” which is basically that Katja/Newline had an obligation to pursue the claim against Warner Bros for, you know, making Gravity —

Craig: Right.

John: Which is the same as their project or related to their project, she wasn’t buying that. So that was sort of the upshot of that. It looks like there’s still one more round of this where they’re able to go back another time and try to make their case on the specific nature of the relationship, but she’s even sort of drawing a tighter circle about what could be in this revised complaint. So we’ll see what happens next.

Craig: it’s getting pretty watered down. I mean, look, she’s —

John: Yeah.

Craig: She’s now saying like, forget whether or not I can prove that they did this; now what I’m really angry about is that they, Newline, didn’t try and sue them. But, yeah, okay, fine and no, but also, where is the substance now? At no point have we ever seen any substance from her that Cuarón’s movie has anything to do with her book or her screenplay with Newline.

John: Yeah. So in her latest blog post Tess Gerritsen talks through sort of her reaction to this whole thing. And so, continuing tradition from the first Gravity, we have our friend Christy reading Tess Gerritsen’s words here so we can respond to it so it’s not just me talking this whole time. So here is a sample of the latest blog post.

“This ruling allows me no possibility of remedy. Even if the Warner Bros film had copied my story word for word there would be nothing I could do about it.”

John: Craig, is that true?

Craig: No, that is totally not true. It’s so not true that my teeth hurt.

John: So let’s imagine this hypothetical where she is exactly right, where there’s just no question that the film Gravity completely copies the plot, story, characters, everything from her book, what would be different about this situation?

Craig: So she’s saying, even if the Warner Bros film had copied my story word for word there would be nothing I could do about it. At that point, the easiest thing for her to do about it would be to file a credits complaint and she would certainly know. File an arbitration complaint with the Guild when the credits for Cuarón’s Gravity are being determined to say, “Hold on a second, they’ve left my name off. I should be included on this as a participating writer.”

If for story alone she had written material, not just the novel but had also written screenplay material, so right off the bat, there is a way — and let me point out, you don’t even have to be employed. If she had written a screenplay in her house and had — and there were some proof that it had existed prior to Cuarón’s screenplay, that would be enough for her to say to the WGA, “Hold on. I got ripped off here. I deserve to be a participating writer. I have material in the final screenplay of this film.” That is separate and apart from her rights issues and her contract issues with Newline and Warner Bros, but it would afford her, if she were correct, and hearing her hypothetical “copied my story word for word” she would almost certainly get some kind of story credit and she would also get residuals.

And then working backwards from there, it would be extremely hard for Warner Bros or Newline to say, “Oh, yeah, and you know what, we’re also not going to now honor the contract that says, if we make a movie of your book, you get $500,000.” I’ll ignore the 2.5% of net profits since that doesn’t exist.” Really, what it comes down to is $500,000 and credit. And so, of course, there would have been something she could have done about it.

But no, the Warner Bros film did not copy her story word for word. And I find this very slippery. What’s she’s doing is saying, “Well, okay, what I know is that I cannot show that they copied my story word for word or a word as far as I could tell, so I’ll just say that if they had, there’d be nothing I could about it.” But they didn’t and there would have been.

John: Yeah. Also, imagine this hypothetical. So let’s say it plays out more the way the real situation does where Tess Gerritsen says she was aware that there was a film called Gravity, at the time, she believed it wasn’t based on her book at all. It was only after seeing the movie that she was aware like, oh, she said she became aware like, “Oh, clearly, this is based on my thing. And I find out later that Cuarón knew about it and all that stuff.” Let’s say all of that is true, if in this hypothetical it really were based sort of word by word on her book or very strongly related to her book, there is no way Warners would have let this go to a lawsuit. The hypotheticals would have worked out very differently because there would be no sort of ambiguity about what the situation is.

The reality is she is sort of waves her hands and saying, “It’s the same title. It’s about these same kinds of things” but when you dig deeper into it, they’re very, very different stories. And that’s why Warners feels like, “You know what, these aren’t related at all.” And I think a lot of people would find they’re not related at all if they actual compare it apples-to-apples.

Let’s listen to a little bit more from what she says.

“The court’s latest decision focused solely on the Warner Bros/Newline corporate relationship. It did not take into consideration my novel or Cuarón’s film or the similarities between them.”

Well, that’s true. This is the nature of this new complaint and this new round was that it was only supposed to be about this relationship. That’s all they’re allowed to talk about.

Craig: Yeah, she’s saying this like she didn’t file this complaint.

John: Yeah.

Craig: She files a complaint saying, “Hold on, these two companies are more related than they think and the judge is saying, ‘Actually, no, they’re not.'” And now she’s complaining that they didn’t talk about the material in the book?

John: Yeah. One last one here.

“It did not address my third-act rewrite of Michael Goldenberg’s Gravity script in which I depicted satellite debris colliding with the International Space Station, the destruction of ISS, and the sole surviving female astronaut adrift in her EVA suit.”

So this is new information for me because this is the first time I think I’ve seen her claiming that she actually wrote on the screenplay itself or that she’d — because she said something about like she was writing like story stuff, but I’m really unclear now, was she hired to write on the movie? Like, is she a contracted writer on the movie? What is she claiming here?

Craig: The truth is that, I’m not sure, because like you, I seem to recall that she was providing story material of some kind in additional to her novel, you know, prose material that then was handed to Goldenberg possibly or maybe handed to the studio and not handed to Goldenberg. We don’t know. Now she’s saying that she did a rewrite of his screenplay itself. Either way your depiction, her depiction of satellite debris colliding with the international space station, the destruction of the space station, and the sole surviving female astronaut adrift in her EVA suit would in its essence have no more to do with Cuarón’s Gravity then what was it called, Deep Space Homer did?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, when The Simpsons did it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: This is the part about this that’s so puzzling to me, she —

John: South Park defense.

Craig: Yeah, there you go. Tess Gerritsen is behaving as if she invented the concept of a space station in trouble and astronauts adrift in space. I remember seeing that whole, the Mission of Mars movie had astronauts drifting in space. This is not new and that’s not the core of unique literary expression in fixed form. I think she refuses to acknowledge the fact that these casual similarities do not rise to the test of infringement or use of her copyrighted material or the material that she licensed to Newline. She has provided still as far as I can tell no concrete evidence. The way, for instance, was provided in the Sherlock Holmes case by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s nothing. She’s just making assertions.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I think frankly if her book had been called something other than Gravity, we wouldn’t be dealing with this lawsuit. It’s like the title has become a fetish where you can’t get past the fact that it’s two things, a book with one title and a movie with the one title and they’re both about trouble in space but that’s seems to be — I just, I’m puzzled by this. I don’t know why she’s continuing to do this. She’s going to keep losing because what’s not there is what needs to be there. This is the, you know, the case of the dog that didn’t bark. Where is the literary material that is the same?

John: So I do think I understand more why she’s pursuing it because from her perspective all of us could say these same things until the end of time. And she would still feel in her heart that it was based on it and she’s not going to ever change that feeling. I don’t think she’s going win this lawsuit. But I really do fundamentally understand why she feels the way she feels. It’s really hard to take yourself out of the experience that you lived and the book that you wrote and sort of your perspective. It’s not even sort of egocentricism, it’s just reality. And I kind of get it from her side and I’m sympathetic to her feeling about it.

Where I’m frustrated is that to raise this as like this is a battle cry to all writers that they’re going to try to screw you over, that this is a great injustice being done, that all writers are in danger. And this was my frustration in the original episode, too, is that she’s trying to generalize her kind of unique situation to the plight of all writers and that’s actually not accurate.

Craig: It’s not accurate. Here is the nightmare scenario she’s putting out there as one that she’s experiencing and therefore look out everyone. What she’s saying is if you write a novel and you license the film rights to a studio, the studio can then essentially be bought by somebody else and then if that somebody else rips you off, you have no recourse because the studio you sold the rights to are really the only ones that have standing. They’re the ones that have been “injured,” but they’re in bed with the purchasing company so you just got screwed.

John: Yep.

Craig: Here is the problem with that. I don’t believe that’s how it works at all. It doesn’t work that way because it doesn’t happen. It would happen all the time. If it were that easy, it would constantly happen. It does not. This is the first lawsuit of this kind, I recall. And second of all, I would think that if you could show clear infringement, there would be a legal case against the people that you sold your license to to say basically you dealt in bad faith here.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And the material would be the proof, but it’s not there. So what’s happening is I think she’s confusing somebody saying, “You really don’t have,” I mean, based on what you’re saying you don’t have a case with — then none of you would have a case. No, no, it’s just — you don’t have a case. Because the similarities, at least, from what I’ve been presented don’t appear to be there.

John: Yep. So let’s move on to a new topic and this was suggested by a mutual writer friend of ours who asked, “Hey, could you guys talk about turnaround.” And so, turnaround is a term of art that you hear thrown around Hollywood about a script that used to be at one studio and now it’s at a different studio or something is in turnaround and it probably doesn’t mean quite what we think it means. And there actually are very specific terms to it. And so, whenever there is something that has very specific contractual language associated with it, my first recourse is to call Craig Mazin. And so, Craig, let’s talk through turnaround, what it means and what it means for screenwriters.

Craig: Sure. Well, turnaround basically means the studio that had been marching in a direction toward making a movie is turning around. They’re saying, “Look, we have been developing this screenplay. We have decided we are no longer interested in spending more money to develop the screenplay to a place where we could then put it into production. We are ceasing development on this project.”

John: Why would a studio decide to stop?

Craig: Well, all sorts of reasons. The most obvious is that they realize the futility of the effort. [laughs] After a bunch of tries, they all look at each other and go, “Does anybody still like this?” I mean, sometimes people buy things and they think, “Well, the idea is good. We don’t like the script. Let’s develop and now it’ll get good.” It never does.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Very frequently what happens is that there is a change in leadership at the studio. People are fired or quit. New people come in. They look at the development slate and they go, “What’s that?” And someone says, “Oh, yeah, we’ve spent $4 million trying to make that into a movie.” “Well, stop. It’s stupid. I hate it.” The project is now in turnaround.

John: What kinds of projects can go into turnaround? Is it anything that a studio is developing or only very specific kinds of projects?

Craig: Every single thing they’re developing can be put into turnaround. There are things that are more likely than others to be put in turnaround.

John: But let’s not conflate the idea of letting the option on a book lapse is not the same thing as turnaround. So in general, something that gets put into turnaround is something that the studio owns out right and entirely. So it could be a spec script that they purchased. It could be a book that they purchased. They didn’t just option it. They actually purchased it. They bought out all the rights to it. They own it and control it. So it’s not that they have a ticking clock on it. They really are done.

So, a lot of the work that I end up doing, working on is adaptations of books. And so there are some of those movies that haven’t been made. But those projects that I’ve written can’t go into turnaround really because they’ve left the options on those underlying books lapse. Or there’s some fundamental rights that are not associated directly with my script that a person would also have to buy. And so those things don’t tend to go into turnaround.

Craig: Yeah, essentially what happens is when they let rights cycles lapse, that is the ultimate proof of turnaround. Essentially, they’re saying, “We have a renewal fee coming up. Do we want to spend money to renew this or should we just kill this thing now?” So they say, “Let’s kill it now and let the cycle lapse.” It is essentially turned around and then it goes out of rights cycle, yeah.

John: Yeah. But in general, we mean turnaround when the studio is actively letting someone else buy it. Is that what you mean for turnaround?

Craig: No, to me, a movie studio can go into turnaround on a project and that’s the last thing anyone ever hears of it. It’s a dead letter office project. They stop developing it and it goes away forever. But things can be bought out of turnaround by other studios. And that’s where it gets a little interesting.

John: Great. So talk us through how a studio can buy something out and what a screenwriter needs to know about turnaround. If she was working on a project that is now in turnaround, what does that mean for her?

Craig: At the moment, it means that the studio that hired you or purchased your spec screenplay is no longer interested in making it into a movie. They’re not going to be spending any more money on you or any other writer to keep marching towards possible production.

It doesn’t, however, mean it’s dead absolutely. It just means it’s dead there. At that time, if an agent says to you, “Hey, look, you know, maybe we can get another studio interested in getting this out of turnaround,” what they’re saying is we can get another buyer who can come to your studio and say, “We actually like this project. Can we have it? Would you sell it to us?”

And this creates an interesting situation for — let’s call them Studio A has put something into turnaround and Studio B comes along and says, “Oh, you know, actually we would take that off your hands.” The question now becomes an issue of negotiation.

Studio A, let’s say, John, they buy a script from you. It’s an original. After a year, they say to you, “You know what, we kind of want to bring in a new voice.” So then they bring in me, which is natural, of course. [laughs] Of course.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Because they are hopeful, John.

John: To pay twice as much.

Craig: Yeah. [laughs] They want this to be good. So they bring it to me, I work on it for a year and then they look at each other and say, “Wow.”

John: We made a huge mistake. I mean, Craig Mazin to rewrite the script? What were we thinking?

Craig: [laughs] Basically, both of these guys have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither of them know what they’re doing and this should not be a movie. Let’s put it into turnaround.

Now, you, not me, because here’s the thing, I don’t control anything there, ultimately. I don’t have anything sort of to buy. And I’ll explain why. You do. You have this first script. So your agent goes to Studio B and says, “Let’s go get it out of turnaround.” Studio B calls up Studio A and says, “Hey, you’ve spent X dollars developing this on John and Craig and you’ve gotten nowhere and you have nothing to show for it, nor will you ever. How about we take it off your hands?” And Studio A says, “Fine. Pay us what we spent on it and you could take it off our hands.”

And then Studio B goes, “Nah, I don’t think so. How about we give you half? Half is better than nothing.” And so the negotiation begins. The reason that you have to drive that and not me is because of chronology. See, my screenplay is based on yours. Your screenplay is based on nothing. You created it. If they came and they just said, “We just want Craig’s script,” the problem is that my script is useless because it’s based on your script and Studio A would still own your script.

John: Yeah. Chain of title.

Craig: Chain of title. They’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning. That’s the key one. Now, they may go back to the beginning and say, “Look, we love John’s script, we hate Craig’s script. We just want to buy John’s script out of turnaround. And we assure you, as we develop it forward from John’s script, we will not be infringing on anything that’s in Craig’s script. So we just want to buy John’s script out of turnaround.”

Sometimes they say, “We actually really like what Craig did. We want to keep going, so we want to buy both scripts out of turnaround.” That’s how it works.

John: That’s great. So when can turnaround kick in? Is there something that a screenwriter needs to be mindful of? Are there ticking clocks, are there windows?

Craig: There are, if you’re talking about reversion. But that’s a different thing than turnaround.

John: Yeah, so let’s go through both of these. And, you know, because I think when the writer was actually asking us, I think he was really looking at reversion. He was looking at a script that was lying dormant for a while.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So let’s draw a sharp line here between turnaround and reversion. So, turnaround is the studio said, “You know what, we’re done.” Another studio comes to it and says, “Oh, you know what, we actually would really want to do that.” And sometimes, individual writers will have in their contract specific language about that turnaround, that there would be some sort of dates and times and abilities to control. But in a general sense, it’s just a negotiation where Studio B comes to studio and says, “Hey, you know what, we actually really do want to make this movie. What would you think about that?”

Now, Craig, sometimes Studio A doesn’t want to make the movie but they don’t want Studio B to make the movie either. Let’s figure out why they wouldn’t want that to happen.

Craig: Happens all the time. It is one thing to say, “We’re making a guess that this project is not worth producing.” It’s another thing to say, “We’re making a guess that this project is not worth producing and we’re willing to let another studio prove us right.” Because they may prove you wrong and there are a lot of examples of this.

For instance, Fox had The Blind Side. They didn’t think it was worth producing. They let it go in turnaround to Alcon and Warner Bros. And Alcon and Warner Bros. went along and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Fox was wrong.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That is, it’s embarrassing and it impacts them competitively. I mean, the worst thing in the world is you put a movie out in the same week and another studio puts out a movie that you used to have but you let go in turnaround and they kick your butt. It’s a little bit like trading a pitcher to another team and then three weeks later that pitcher no hits you. It’s just a terrible feeling.

So sometimes, it’s worth it to them to just bite the bullet and say, “No one gets it because we don’t want to have our faces rubbed in this.” And they can do that if they so desire on projects that are based on underlying material.

But, interestingly, they can’t completely do that with impunity when we’re talking about an original screenplay. And this is where reversion comes in. A turnaround is something that studios do. Reversion is something a writer can do. And this is something that’s in our collective bargaining agreement.

John: So talk us through it. Talk us through what a writer has the ability to do if she has written an original screenplay or something that she’s set up off of a pitch. It was her entire idea.

Craig: So she sold a spec or she pitched something that was original, they bought it, and she’s written the first screenplay. She has originated this. That is, A, number one criteria, it must be original. If there’s underlying material, there’s no way that she would ever be able to control the rights in toto for somebody else, right? Because there would be an author out there. Okay, so that’s number one. Script must be original.

Next, she has to wait five years from either the sale of her spec or when she finishes her initial services. If she’s hired to write a draft or even if she’s hired to write two drafts, when she’s finished with that, that’s when the clock starts. She’s got to wait five years.

Five years and then on the day that five years is up, a two-year window begins. The two-year window allows her to go shop this somewhere else. But we’ve got some restrictions. And frankly, the restrictions are so odious that reversion happens extraordinarily rarely. It is unicornic, as we often say on the show.

So, restrictions. You’ve got your two years. One, the two-year window only really begins if the script is not in what they call active development. Well, what is active development? From our point of view as writers, well, are you paying another writer to work on this? From their point of view, while we’re looking for another writer, we’re having meetings with writers, we’ve attached an actor, we’re talking to directors.

It can get very fuzzy. And essentially, the studio can obliterate your effective two-year window if they really want to. If they really wanted to, they can just pay somebody scale. They can chuck 60 grand at somebody to go really slowly over two years. So, there’s that.

Let’s say they’re cool about it. They’re like, “Yeah, cool. Take your two years. You got it.” All right. You can get the script back at that point by paying the studio the money that they paid you.

John: So in my case, let’s say that I wanted to reacquire the script that you had horribly butchered and the five years have passed. So I would be able to pay them back the 100K they had paid me to write the script — so let’s say it was a pitch. So I write them a check for $100,000 and I own the script again. And I don’t have to pay the money that they paid you, right?

Craig: That’s almost right. Yes, you don’t have to pay the money that they paid me. However, you have to pay them, I believe, the money that they paid you, plus interest, I think. I think. It may just be that you have to pay them back the money they paid you. Let’s just say it is. Fine.

John: Okay.

Craig: You give them that money. Right off the bat, that can be a problem because let’s say they bought your script for $1 million. You don’t get $1 million. You get $900,000 after your agent. Whoop, it’s down to $850,000 after lawyer. Whoop, it’s down to, let’s say, 500 grand after taxes, okay?

John: Yup.

Craig: And that was five years ago. They need $1 million. So right off the bat, that’s an issue. Okay, that’s number one. Now, you could theoretically find a studio to back you on this, right. If a studio wanted to buy it, that’s probably the way it works.
So at that point, let’s say you have a partner in line already. And they say, “Yeah, we’ll take care of it. We will pay back the money for you.” But the new purchasing studio, in the case of reversion — because remember, reversion is something that must happen if you follow the rules. It’s in our contract. It’s not something that Studio A could do, right? If you catch them the right way with the rules, they have to give it.

So, unfortunately, there are punitive things built in. Studio B, when they’re trying to get something that you’re reverting, they have to pay the original studio for all the costs to all the subsequent writers, including the pension and health that was paid on top of that, and interest on top of it.

And this becomes tough, especially if you wrote a spec screenplay and then, as is often the case, six writers came along and each of them, you know, $1 million a pop or more and there’s $8 million against the screenplay and you get the rights, you know, in your two-year window and you take it out of Disney and you bring it over to Universal and they’re like, “Well, we’d love to but it’s going to cost us $12 million just for a script. And that’s too much. We can’t do it.”

And so, unfortunately, this is why reversion is very, very rare. It’s basically saying, “You can get your script back but you have a very narrow timeline in which you can do it. And the studio you sell it to has to be full burdened of development paid for. It can’t be negotiated down.” Frankly, you’re much better off just doing a traditional turnaround process.

John: Yeah. That sounds brutal. So, very few projects do go through reversion. More projects sometimes do go through turnaround. You and I both, through our Fox deal, we have sort of special reversion rights on the things we write underneath that special Fox deal. So I think sometimes there are special cases where, you know, a screenwriter would have better terms than sort of the standard WGA deal.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But it’s not common. And so, the writer who’s writing to us, I think he was asking about this exact sort of reversion question. And our general answer back to him is that it’s theoretically possible. But it’s challenging.
Would our advice to him be to go forthright up to the studio and say, “Hey, it’s about this five-year window and I’m just wondering because I would like to reacquire it,” or should he just wait and then suddenly spring it?

Craig: I would wait and suddenly spring it.

John: I agree.

Craig: You know how this goes. People don’t want something until they realize somebody else wants it. You know, the worst thing you could do is come to a studio and say, “Hey, look, I was thinking about maybe getting the script out of turnaround because Chris Pratt wants to be in it now.” They’re like, “What? Oh, really? Great.”

John: What? What? What?

Craig: “He could be in it for us. And please go away. We’re hiring another writer.” So, in a way, you kind of want to spring it on them. It will work best if there is not a lot of money against the project. It’s going to be very tough to get it out of there with reversion if there is a lot.

John: Yeah. That is absolutely true. The last bit of leverage that you might have is that sometimes there are relationships. And this is a relationship business. And there are cases I can think of where someone has been able to take a project from one studio to another studio when Studio A would wouldn’t make it, they got it to Studio B because you say like, “I will never work for you again unless you let me make this movie somewhere else.”

And if you are a filmmaker with enough power to do that, Studio A may say yes because they want you to be happy and they want you to be able to do things in the future. I guess my general advice in the situation is become a very powerful filmmaker and then you can have more ability to do turnaround and reversion in the way you want them to happen.

Craig: No question. I mean, let’s remember that reversion, as I’ve described it, is something that we “get” for better or worse in the minimum basic agreement. It is a right for every single writer, including the person that has just sold their first screenplay. It is not a particularly great right.

So you always have the opportunity to do better when you have leverage when you’re selling something. You can put in what they call Proceed to Production clauses where if the company does not get you to production in a certain amount of time, you automatically get things back in an easy way.

Or you’re in a position where you can say, “Look, I’m writing this for you. You don’t want to do that. Let these guys do it and I’ll do that for you.” But when you’re talking about the minimum basics, unfortunately, our reversion rights are minimum.

John: The last thing I want to ask you about, Craig, is sometimes in relationship turnaround, I’ve heard something happen about like, oh suddenly this actor became attached and therefore that canceled the turnaround.

Craig: Yup.

John: What’s happening with that? What is the nature of that attachment that messed up turnaround?

Craig: Yeah, I mean, there’s a thing called no new elements where basically, when you have Proceed to Production clauses and everybody deals with this. Producers deal with this, writers, directors, everybody. When you have any kind of contractual arrangement where you’re saying, “Look, if you don’t get me to production in a certain amount of time, I get to leave with this.” Or if you have a deal where it’s like, “Oh, I have a first look for you, right? I have a first look. You get to look at it once. If you pass, I get to take it somewhere else.”

A lot of times, you’ll see a no new elements clause which basically says, “Hey, when we say we don’t want it, we say we don’t want it as you’re showing it to us. But if you add a new element to that, like attaching a big actor or attaching a big director, that’s not the same thing you showed us. We get to have that now or at least we get a chance to say no to that.”
And that’s only fair. Let’s say you spend a whole bunch of money to give somebody a bungalow and a production deal and all the overhead and the whole deal is but you bring us stuff first, and they bring you a script but they don’t really want to do it with you, so like, “Yeah, here’s the script and we don’t have anybody attached.” They’re like, “Um, no.” “Okay, thanks.” And then a week later you realize, you read that they have sold it to a different studio with Chris Pratt attached, “Come on, guys. It doesn’t work that way.”

So when they add a new element, or you add a new element, you got to realize you’re kind of resetting the clock.

John: Absolutely true. Great. So let’s get to some questions that were left over from our live show and talk through as many of them as we can. Jenny Shelton asked, “Can you talk about the difference between selling a screenplay versus selling a series? And if a new writer has sold a spec pilot, would that guarantee them a spot in the writer’s room?”

So Aline was on the show, so we were talking a lot about television on that episode. But I could talk about sort of selling a pilot because I’ve done that. And you’ve done that now, too.

Craig: Yup.

John: So, selling a screenplay, let’s say you’re a new writer and you sell a screenplay. You are going to be sticking around for minimum of one new draft, Craig. What is the guarantee for new writers selling a spec screenplay?

Craig: The minimum?

John: Minimum.

Craig: You are guaranteed the first employed draft, essentially.

John: Great. So you will have a purchase price for that screenplay and they will also have to pay you Writers Guild minimum at least to do a rewrite of that draft. But there’s no guarantee that you’re going to continue on with that project after that.

In series land, there’s probably some WGA minimums there. I don’t know what they are. But I’ll tell you, in practice, if you are a new writer coming in without a lot of experience and you are writing a spec TV show, which didn’t use to be that common but now sometimes are more common. Well, they will just buy or read a script and say, “Oh, maybe we’ll try to make this.”

The very first thing they’re going to do is partner you up with an experienced showrunner. And, hopefully, the two of you together will figure out how to make this into a series and how to do all these things. You will, yes, be in the room for that show. You’re going to have some role in it. And as long as you prove yourself to be invaluable to it, you will have a function on that show. If you do not prove yourself to be invaluable, they will find a way to not have you be part of the show.

Craig: Unfortunately, that is true.

John: That is true. So, creatively, I mean, there’ll be contractual language, so you’ll still get paid for some things. But they will try to find a way to not have you be around because you are a drag on their vision for what the show should be.

Craig: Yeah, it’s not like they default to getting rid of the new guy. I mean, it’s not that. It’s just that what they default to is getting rid of somebody that they think is going to be disruptive or counterproductive to the production of the show, which is really hard. And the last thing you can really survive is any kind of toxic presence, particularly in the position of authority. So, yeah, you know, if you’re useful and essential —

John: I was fired off.

Craig: You were fired.

John: Yeah, I was fired off of my TV show.

Craig: Yeah. You were obviously a toxic. You were toxic.

John: I was toxic.

Craig: Toxic. You were toxic. [laughs]

John: Ugh. Steve Betters writes, “With regards to getting an agent, which is better, a really good script, a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 or 3/8? Is there a difference to that answer going for a writer’s assistant job?”

Craig: Too much calculation here, Steve. I wouldn’t worry about that. Who knows? You know, the whole thing about these numbers, the rankings, this is one thing where I think The Black List has caused trouble is The Black List and their system of 1 to 10 has started to codify what these numbers mean. They don’t mean anything at all. A really good script, a 9 let’s say, one really good script, a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10, whose 9? Whose 9 is that?

John: Yeah.

Craig: And three scripts that are 8s, whose 8s? I don’t know what any of that means. This is normal to want to find some predictability and certainty. In a business like this, I must tell you, there’s none. There’s none. You just got to write as well as you can. You can’t write better than you can write. Try and get better as you go. But where you are right now, that’s as good as you can be and that’s as good as you can be.

John: To try to do this without the numbers, let’s do some adjectives rather than numbers. I think to rephrase his question of like would an agent rather have a writer who has written one spectacular script and nothing else or a writer who has written three really good scripts?

I maybe would side with the three really good scripts, only in the sense that you want to know that this person can write multiple things. This person is a workhorse. These are all things that are very exciting for an agent. But honestly, both those situations are probably people that an agent would be interested in.

As far as a writers’ assistant, I’ve never read anything that my assistants have come in — I’ve never read their samples. I’ve never read their screenplay material. So I don’t know that that’s necessarily a huge goal of yours to write an amazing sample to try to get a job as a writer’s assistant because you’re often not being read. You’re basically like, “Hey, you seem like a confident person who’s not going to screw up my life.” That is one of the fundamental characteristics of a great writer’s assistant.

Craig: Is that the way it works for the television writer’s assistants, you know, when they work in the room?

John: You know, I think sometimes they are read like in a staffing kind of way. But my inkling is that in many situations, they’re not really being read as writers. They’re being, you know, hired for — this person seems like a competent person to take the order from Tender Greens and not screw things up.

Craig: Ah, I couldn’t do that.

John: Yeah. I could never do that. And the fact that they end up becoming a good writer and that they have good ideas in the room is what gets a co-EP to read heir script and say, “Oh my gosh she can actually write.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that hopefully gets them the freelance episode on one of the shows.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Wayward writes, “Say, you’re bogged down in a script, around the rocky shoals.” This is an Aline Brosh McKenna term. She’s talking about pages 60 to 80, sort of like post middle, before you get into the third act. “Maybe things aren’t coming to you as fluidly as they were on the pages before, what are some good ways to evaluate whether or not you should put your head down and push through or take a step back and reevaluate the decisions you made up to that point?” Craig, what’s your advice as you’re getting stuck there?

Craig: I think you should probably consider doing both. I mean, you certainly want to go back, read from the start again and ask yourself where your plan might have gone awry. Hopefully, you had a plan. And maybe think to yourself that perhaps you are projecting the end of your script a little further away than it actually was.

What I notice is that a lot of people who run into the rocky shoals between 60 and 80 end up with a 128-page script and think, “Oh actually, I really think this is reading long. I probably should just move things up.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because things take longer to write than we think they’re going to take. But if you’re having trouble there, take a break. Show it to somebody that you trust, read it out loud, put it aside and come back in a week.

Or if you haven’t organized things prior to the writing, this would be the time to sit down and start making index cards and really ask yourself what needs to happen to get me from here to here and what would be the most interesting way to do that.

John: I think long-term listeners will know exactly what my advice will be, which is to skip ahead and write the third act stuff that you know because my hunch is that you have a really good sense of what’s happening later on. You’re just stuck in this one little moment. Write that stuff that you do know later on. Just don’t forget about sort of like what’s going to go in that middle part.

By the time you’ve gotten through that stuff, you’ll have some clarity about what needed to happen to get you to that moment. And what Craig’s realization of like, “Oh man, maybe I didn’t need all that stuff,” will probably become very clear once you’ve written that later stuff. That’s just my way of doing it.

Craig: I’m with you. Here, I’ll read one, if you’d like. This is from Rebecca. She says, “Army wife here. I’m happy with the idea of moving to LA to work my butt off. And my husband is very supportive of my writing. But the army thing, down with the Ryan Knighton version of doing things, I’m just wondering if you have any other suggestions for me. Are their entry type jobs like long-distance reading, et cetera, that might be possible for a gal like me? Not so delusional to think I can just write a spec and break in from wherever the army takes us. Also, want to be realistic and mature. If it’s not meant for me now, then it’s not.”

What do you have to say to Rebecca?

John: I love Rebecca.

Craig: She’s cool.

John: Rebecca is the best.

Craig: What I love about Rebecca mostly is that she drops the subjects of sentences. I love that.

John: [laughs]

Craig: I do that all the time.

John: She’s writing like she’s writing action lines.

Craig: Yeah.

John: You know, like a clipped scene.

Craig: It’s exciting.

John: Yeah, I love Rebecca because she is both optimistic and realistic simultaneously which is such a difficult quality to pull off. So, yes, as an army wife, you are probably going to travel around a lot. Los Angeles may not be the easiest place for you to get to. I would say that she should write, write, write wherever she is and build up a war chest of maybe three good screenplays and then look at whether it’s going to be realistic for her to come out to Los Angeles for a period of time and really make a run at this.

And whether their family — I don’t know if they have kids, sort of what their situation is, but there might be a realistic situation where she’s out here for six months trying to figure out this thing and see if it’s really going to be possible for her and see if it will work.

She won’t know until she tries. And I think it’s worth maybe trying.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s easier now than it’s ever been before. So one thing Rebecca could consider is just dipping your toe in by writing a script and sending it off to a place like The Black List, not because the numbers are determinative of anything. But at least, they can give you a general idea, am I way off base here? Am I the guy who goes on American Idol and gets laughed at? Am I the woman who goes on American Idol and they’re like, you’re good, you’re just not great? Or am I the person who goes on and they go, wow, you could actually win this thing?

Generally, find out what general bubble you’re in and then make some choices based on that because the last thing you want to do is uproot your life over something that probably just is never going to happen or won’t make you happy while you’re trying to make it happen. So get some like — I would say start there, by getting some very broad evaluations of your work, just so you have a sense of like where am I exactly in this whole thing?

John: And I’d also say that screenwriting is one of the few kinds of writing that is so location-dependent. Anything else you want to write, you could kind of write from anywhere. And so if there’s another kind of thing you want to write, if you want to write short stories, you want to write novels, if you want to write plays, honestly, all of that stuff happens everywhere. Screenplays and television, it’s just one of those rare things that is so specific to Los Angeles and to some degree New York, a little bit to Austin. It’s just not as realistic to do at other places.

So if there’s another kind of writing that you also like, try that other kind of writing.

Craig: Yeah. Agreed.

John: Kevin writes, “Random question. In Hangover III, one of the great jokes in my humble opinion is ‘Nobody eats four marshmallows, Stu!’

Craig: Nobody eats four marshmallows, Stu! [laughs]

John: This joke is in theory is set up in Hangover II, but could have been reverse engineered after the fact. What is the genesis of this joke, Craig Mazin?

Craig: I am the genesis of this joke. [laughs] Well, it wasn’t reverse engineered. It was forward engineered. So in Hangover II, Alan — oh, spoiler alert — Alan drugs his friends. He’s just trying to drug Stu’s fiancee’s brother with some chloroform-laced marshmallows. Well, I don’t know, I can’t even remember what he puts in the marshmallows, but we started with chloroform. And unfortunately, everybody eats the marshmallows and they all get drugged.

And so in Hangover III, we had a scene where the guys were on their way to Tijuana to meet up with Mr. Chow and we needed just like a bridging scene there and we had written one and we got out there and we were shooting it. And, you know, shooting scenes in cars is the worst. I mean we had the guys actually in a car. And we were in the chase car and all the process truck.

It just was not working. The scene was just deadly. I can’t even remember what it was. All I know is that — so after about few takes, Todd said, “All right. We’re not — this is never going to be in the movie. We got to figure something else out.” And so I did a first draft of another scene that we ended up then shooting in like a green screen car which I got to say, shooting green screen in cars now is great. It really — I mean for a simple discussion in car — I mean, for a cool car scene, no, but for a simple car discussion, it’s pretty great. It’s so much easier anyway.

And in that scene, they’re talking about how they’re going to get Mr. Chow and Alan suggests that he can drug Mr. Chow. He’s drugged lots of people before and Stu says, “Yeah, us. You almost killed us.” And Alan says, “No, that’s ridiculous. I set it so that you could eat at least three marshmallows before you would die.” [laughs] And Stu’s like, “What are you saying? That if we had eaten four marshmallows, we would have died?” And Alan says, “Nobody eats four marshmallows, Stu.”

I just love that Alan’s logic was such that he thought it through. And he’s like, “Yeah, no one’s going to ever eat four marshmallows. That was it. And that’s why —

John: It’s not a possible thing.

Craig: That’s why Stu is alive because — and by the way, here’s the crazy thing. Alan was right. Nobody eats four marshmallows. Nobody.

John: I’ve eaten four marshmallows in my life.

Craig: Yeah. You should be dead.

John: Adam Alterberg writes, “What are some tips for writing for production? Does the tone change when you’re doing rewrites day after day?” I’ll take the first crack at this. I would say yes. If you’re like literally writing the stuff that is being shot tomorrow, you might find yourself being a little less artful in the scene description and little bit more pragmatic to exactly what’s happening.

I do find that I’m a little less precious about my clauses and sort of how things are going to play in the non-dialogue lines because I’m just trying to get it to be as clear as possible and specific so that everyone and every department knows exactly what needs to happen.

Craig, have you found any change in what your writing feels like when you’re writing for production?

Craig: Yes, I think that is generally far more compact. It’s concise. And when you are writing during production, you are, well, you should be informed by what you’ve been watching. You’re starting to pick up on certain rhythms. You’re starting to see which actors do better with which material. You’re starting to see which ones are more fun when they’re talking and which ones are more fun when they’re not. And you’re writing to everyone’s strengths. And you’re also writing within the tone of what seems to be sticking out as good and away from stuff that maybe just wasn’t working.

I mean, production is going to reveal things about your screenplay. Nobody gets everything right, so your job is to notice what is right? And then write towards that. This is why very frequently the stuff that you write during production has a much higher rate of inclusion in the final movie because it’s informed.

John: There will be some times where, in the scene descriptions, like not angry at all dash dash because like you see that one actor is going just nutso in a place and you need to sort of rein that back. In the live show, we talked about writing with locked pages. And so you’re trying not to force page breaks because then it becomes an extra page. And so sometimes I will write the shortest sentence imaginable so it doesn’t break in to two lines, so you try to get things together. It’s not nearly so pretty.

And the funny thing is sometimes when they send out the Academy For Your Consideration scripts, you can sort of tell like which scenes were like the pristine sort of like, oh, the literary scenes like where everything is beautiful and like which were just like the nuts and bolts for productions scenes. You can sort of tell a shift in how that scene description is written.

Craig: Yeah, for sure. I mean you start to lose all of the fufara, the fufara.

John: Yeah, it starts as poetry and becomes —

Craig: Yeah.

John: Much less.

Craig: Much less. Amy, is this your daughter or a different Amy?

John: It’s not my daughter. It is some other, Amy. There’s apparently multiple Amy’s in the world.

Craig: Who knew? Amy writes, “Is an unknown writer better off writing ‘high concept’ specs, that is to say inherently big budget, or should I write an indie drama with a limited budget.” There’s a lot of presumptions in that question. [laughs]

John: [laughs] I think most of our listeners know, our standard advice here is you should write the script that is the best script you can possibly write and the script that could actually get made. And both the high concept and the indie script have a chance of getting made if they’re the right kind of thing.

But if you are a person who should be writing big things, then write the big thing. If you are person who should be writing the small thing, you should write the small thing. If you don’t know what kind of writer you really are and what’s really interesting to you, pick one and write it and let’s see what happens.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Craig, what’s your thoughts?

Craig: I completely agree that we have lots of examples of people breaking in with big, big action adventure, tent pole kind of movies. We also have a plenty of examples of people doing the opposite and writing very small independent films and breaking in that way. And you have to write what you’re good at. Nobody wants Diablo Cody’s tent pole action movie. I don’t think Diablo Cody wants Diablo Cody’s tent pole action movie. It’s just not what interests her creatively, at least not to this point.

Similarly speaking, I’m not sure that I would want and I’m trying to think of like a big tent pole-y kind of guy. Like I don’t want their tiny little movies.

John: Simon Kinberg.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Let’s think about Simon Kinberg.

Craig: I don’t want Simon Kinberg’s My Dinner with Andre. I just don’t. I want Simon to do what Simon does. I will challenge this, though. High concept does not mean inherently big budget. There are a lot of tiny movies that are very high concept. High concept just means that there’s a big hooky idea at the heart of the script. And you can have a very small movie with a big hooky idea in it.

John: I agree. Juan writes, “I’m currently pursuing a BFA in film production at Emerson College. I’m also having a quarter life crisis because I have no idea what I’m going to do once I graduate. What are your thoughts in pursuing a collegiate film education versus diving into the industry head on?”

Craig: First of all —

John: We’ve talked about this before, but —

Craig: I mean —

John: Go.

Craig: He says he’s having a quarter life crisis, but that presumes he’s going to make it to 80. We don’t know Juan. [laughs] This could be mid life.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Think about it. This could be end life.

John: You could be dead tomorrow, Juan.

Craig: Exactly. You may not be alive right now.

John: You may eat your fourth marshmallow and this is all for none.

Craig: Nobody eats four marshmallows, John.

John: Oh, true.

Craig: I kind of love the way Zach said that. He was like righteously indignant. [laughs] Like how dare you say something that stupid? Look, my personal feeling if you are asking, and you are, is dive in. I believe in diving in. I think that if you have the money and the luxury and the time and you have been accepted to one of the very few prestigious film schools like UCLA or USC or NYU. I don’t even know if UCLA counts, USC or NYU, then sure, it’s something absolutely to consider. You will meet a lot of people. John went there and met a lot of people.

But on the other hand, it is absolutely not necessary. Scott Frank, I think, went to UC Santa Barbara. I’m not even sure he went to graduate school there. I didn’t go to film school. I don’t think Ted Griffin went to film school. I don’t think John Gatins went to film school. Alec Berg didn’t go to film school. I’m just running down a list of friends that just didn’t go, you know.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And we just dove in. So I would say, consider it a luxury. And if you have the money and the time, go for it. If you’re ready to go now and you’re more of a dive-in, let’s just do this, I learn better by doing guy, then dive in.

John: I largely agree with Craig. I did go to film school and it was hugely valuable to me. And I don’t think I would have the same career perspective if I hadn’t gone through film school. I just, I wasn’t ready to dive in, but film school was a great place for me to start.

I’m a little concerned for Juan that he feels, you know, finishing up his BFA and whatever is happening at Emerson isn’t giving him the confidence to say, “I know what’s next. I know what my steps are.” Well, that’s something you should be getting out of film school. You should be hopefully making friends and contacts with people who you want to be working with for the next 15 years and be excited about making movies.

And if film school is not making you excited about making movies, then something is wrong. So I can’t fix everything. But that’s my punch.

Craig: I just don’t think that anybody taking an undergraduate course in film production anywhere is going to get that kind of thing. I mean you, like you and Rian, I believe Rian went to USC as well, right? Rian Johnson. So you guys went to — this is a, you know, premier film school and it is supported by extraordinary alumni like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and others. And the people that you meet there are the cream of the crop and they will be in the movie business. They may be in the movie business hiring you. I mean they have a whole production, you know, a whole system for that.

Emerson College is a perfectly fine school, but I can’t imagine that a BFA in film production from Emerson College is going to put you in touch with a lot of people that will ultimately end up in Hollywood nor I am surprised that you seem puzzled as what to do.

This is the problem with higher education right now anyway. A lot of what passes for so called film studies in undergraduate education is really about film criticism. And it’s not about filmmaking. And you may have found some filmmaking there, I hope you did. There is no substitute for actual filmmaking.

People are different. Like John said something interesting. He wasn’t ready. And that’s important to know. And if you don’t feel ready, find your way to kind of — that channel that will prepare you. If you do feel ready, if you’re impatient — I was born impatient — then honor that and get in there. Get your hands dirty.

John: And I recognize as you were talking there that I misread and I was — for some reason thought he was an MFA rather than a BFA. So he’s an undergrad and as an undergrad, he asks, you know what, it’s kind of actually totally natural to not know what’s next and what’s happening. So I was sort of slamming Emerson for not helping you out as an MFA, but, no, as a BFA, you’re supposed to be a little bit lost in the weeds now. That’s just part of your nature and your life.

And so if you feel like you need more structure getting started, moving out to LA and going to a film school would be great. Moving out to LA and being the person who is scrambling would also be great. So just know which kind of person you are.

Craig: Agreed.

John: Do you want to take the last one here, Craig?

Craig: Sure, the last is from Crowe Sensei. “In episode 82” — oh, come on. That’s not fair. “Craig said,” like I would remember, “Craig said, he would be willing to read the entire script of The Answerer by Ben W. after reading his Three Page Challenge. Did Ben W ever send it in and did Craig read it?”

Yes. Now, I’m going from memory here because this is years ago, but I believe, yes, Ben W. did send me the whole thing. Yes, I read it. Yes, I liked it. And in fact, as I recall, I actually did send it along to a friend who worked at a, well, let’s just say a very prestigious animation studio, because it was intended to be animation, I believe. Or even if it wasn’t, it seemed appropriate for that medium.

So I actually did a nice thing. That’s how I remember it. That’s how I remember it, by the way. [laughs]

John: But I kind of remember that, too. I remember you talking about this on the previous episode that you did actually follow up with him and you did forward it on. So my recollection of it was the same as what you’ve just said, which means it probably actually happened.

Craig: How could we both be wrong?

John: That’s not possible.

Craig: Not possible.

John: Nobody eats four marshmallows.

Craig: No. Nobody eats four marshmallows, John.

John: Craig, talk to us about One Cool Thing.

Craig: Okay. So my One Cool Thing was featured at E3. By the way, I went to E3 for a day.

John: Oh my God, Craig, you went to E3? That sounds amazing.

Craig: It was —

John: Was it a zoo?

Craig: Yeah, it was a zoo, but it was a great zoo. It was like a zoo of — I mean, you know, there was a lot of fedora wearing, very cool stuff there. Just a general trend, virtual headsets everywhere. Everywhere. Everyone’s making them.

But Microsoft in conjunction with the Minecraft people demonstrated this thing. I didn’t see this live, but there is a video of it and we’ll put it in the show notes. It’s pretty startling. So they’re using this new technology from Microsoft called the Microsoft HoloLens. Have you seen this thingy?

John: I have. So it looks like a visor that’s in front of you, but you’ll actually be able to see through it and at the same, they’re projecting image into the lens you’re looking through.

Craig: Yeah. So essentially, it’s putting virtual things in your environment that you can see and they’re of remarkable quality, actually. And they were demonstrating how you can use this with say a game like Minecraft where you have a table set up and the HoloLens understands that this table is specifically key to what it’s creating and you can start to just through voice commands create an entire structure in Minecraft in front of you, in real space, right there that you can see and you can manipulate it. And by moving your head into it, you can see inside it.

It’s kind of remarkable. In looking at this stuff, you start to realize, we are on the verge of some awesome stuff, I mean truly awesome, mind-blowing stuff that’s going to change the way we interact with that world around us.

That said, apparently, the demo for this thing was kind of goosed to be maybe a little bit better than you might be able to get now. I mean I don’t know even know if the HoloLens is specifically available yet. But from what I understand, there are some field of view issues with this thing. It doesn’t quite work the way you want it to work yet. But as a general proof of concept, it’s astonishing, just astonishing.

And the applications are — I mean, just absurd when you think of the things that you can do once they nail this stuff down. It’s going to be pretty amazing. And I would imagine, John, when you and I are 60 years old, the way that we now all walk down the streets staring at our little phone. We’re all going to be walking down the street wearing these stupid goggles and just seeing what we want to see. I mean just seeing an entirely different world. It’s going to be bananas.

John: Yeah, it’s going to be crazy. The same way that I can’t do any work or walk any place without like a podcast in my ears. I will want to have my own reality projected in front of me so I don’t need to see everything that’s horrible around me. So there’s a whole troubling Black Mirror episode that could probably be written about just that.

But we’ll have a video for this demonstration in the show notes because my daughter saw the same video that you linked to. And she squealed like three times.

Craig: It’s squealable, yeah.

John: It is incredible.

Craig: Yeah, way, way cool.

John: Yeah. My One Cool Thing is Jonathan Mann who is a very talented songwriter, composer. He’s mostly known for Song a Day. And so in the sort of nerdy podcast world, he’s certainly well-known. He started listening to the show. And he tweeted that he loves the show. And he also tweeted a link to a video he made called Some Guy and it’s very much related to a conversation we had had where so often in the headlines or even in the stories about the things we write, we’re just referred to as, you know, it’s as if the movie suddenly happened, it was written by Some Guy.

Craig: Right.

John: And Jonathan Mann has a very funny song called Some Guy which is about this very concept. So we will use that as the outro for this week’s episode, so you can take a listen to that as well.

Craig: That’s awesome. Well, thank you, Jonathan. That’s really cool. And we’re glad to have you as listener.

John: So that is our show for this week. If you would like to send us a question, like one of the questions we answered today, short ones are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Our email address is ask@johnaugust and that’s where you can send those longer questions to us. It’s also where, if you have an outro, that you would like to put on the show, something that uses the [hums] intro, send it there. Send us a link to that and we’ll use it in a future episode, perhaps.

We are on iTunes. So go to iTunes please and subscribe. If you’re listening to this on the website where the show notes are, that’s fantastic. Also really helpful, though, if you do subscribe and leave us a comment to let us know that you enjoy the show, hopefully.

We have an app in the App Store. It is called Scriptnotes. It’s for listening to all the back episodes, way back to episode one and all the bonus episodes as well. You can find that in the app store for iOS and for Android. And that’s our show. So Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: And have a great week.

Craig: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Scriptnotes 202, in which we discuss FAST Screenplay
• Scriptnotes 183: The Deal with the Gravity Lawsuit, and follow up from Scriptnotes 186
• The Gerritsen Ruling, in its entirety
• Turnaround on Wikipedia
• The 200th Episode Live Show
• “Nobody eats four marshmallows” from The Hangover 3
• Scriptnotes 82, featuring Ben W’s Three Pages
• Minecraft Hololens demo at E3
• The “Some Guy” Anthem, by Jonathan Mann
• Outro by Jonathan Mann (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/austin-forever).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Susannah Grant:** I’m Susannah Grant.

**John:** And this is Episode 168 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are live at the Austin Film Festival and, Susannah, I cannot believe you and I have done 168 episodes.

**Susannah:** 168. It’s been such a long road together.

**John:** It’s been kind of amazing. Like, what were your favorite episodes that we did?

**Susannah:** [laughs] You know, there was one guy who came once, I think his name was Craig, he was really kind of nice. I liked having him —

**John:** Yeah, he was belligerent.

**Susannah:** Unpleasant, but in a nice way.

**John:** I mean, I think my favorite episode was Episode 34 with Aaron Sorkin where he went on that long rant about robots.

**Susannah:** Right. That was great.

**John:** It was so odd, but he really had a passionate defense for why robots should be ruling society. Then the last year we had a live show and it was Callie Khouri and Vince Gilligan. They got into that rap battle.

**Susannah:** Right.

**John:** I had never heard —

**Susannah:** That was a good one, too.

**John:** I’ve never heard such profanity from Callie Khouri.

**Susannah:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, well, yeah.

**Susannah:** You need to talk to her a little more.

**John:** All right. She can throw down. She can throw down and she can drop a beat. And that was the crucial thing I learned. This episode of Scriptnotes, this live show, probably won’t have as much profanity because we are in a church.

**Susannah:** Yeah. So watch yourself.

**John:** Yeah. It’s odd. We’ll paint the scene for people who are listening at home. There’s literally stained glass all around us.

**Susannah:** Beautiful stained glass.

**John:** It’s really, really pretty. It feels kind of inappropriate for our podcast, but I think we’re going to make this one PG-13. There will be no F-bombs dropped in this sanctuary, I hope.

**Susannah:** Really? Okay. I can do that.

**John:** All right. Now, usually Craig Mazin would be here. And the official reason for why Craig is not here is that he is at a friend’s wedding, and so therefore could not come to the Austin Film Festival. The official reason is not necessarily the most interesting reason. So, I thought one thing we might do is let’s draw a card and pick a different reason for why he’s gone.

So, this is a thing we’re experimenting, we call it Writer Emergency. And it’s when you sort of get stuck on an idea.

**Susannah:** You’ve come up with a bad solution like he’s not there because he’s at a wedding. And you know that’s way too boring, so you have to come up with instead he’s the victim of a zombie attack.

**John:** Yes.

**Susannah:** Much better.

**John:** It’s a much better thing. So, someone who eats Craig Mazin, and eats Craig Mazin’s brain, is that a more powerful zombie? It’s an angrier zombie.

**Susannah:** [laughs] Angrier zombie for sure. I think the zombie army is stronger with Craig Mazin’s brain.

**John:** I’m going to pick on. I just want to say Craig Mazin is not here because…stop talking is the one I got. So, that would be a good lesson for us, and also perhaps why he couldn’t be here is because he’s been struck mute by some strange reason.

We are going to bring up our first guest who is Richard Kelly who has been a frequent guest on the podcast. Richard Kelly, come up here. Richard Kelly, writer and director of films such as Donnie Darko, The Box, Southland Tales. Today on the show I really want to talk about the experience of being a writer and a director. When do you stop writing and when do you sort of put on your director hat as you’re approaching a project?

**Richard Kelly:** I’ve found that the writing process never stops. That it’s endless. Literally it’s in your head forever. I’m still rewriting movies that I directed years and years ago. I’m still editing them in my mind, you know. So, there’s what’s happening in your mind, and then there’s the limitations of the real world and as you get older and as you mature as an artist, hopefully you’re good at setting parameters for when you need to be finished with something and when you need to transition into the next phase and move on.

So, what I’ve found, in the past I would not have enough discipline, I think, in terms of editing the screenplay and getting it to a point where it’s more or less locked. And the actors can do a little improvisation. There are going to be some surprises on set that are going to be wonderful surprises, we hope, but in the past I would just keep adding stuff.

I would be caught up in the moment on set and you’re only there for a limited number of hours. And you have all of these wonderful tools at your disposal. And sometimes I would get caught up in the moment and I would just keep adding more material and adding new scenes. And, you know, that’s fine, but then it becomes a real headache in the editing room because you end up with just way too much material.

And then maybe that time might have been better spent really focusing on what’s essential. So, as you get older as an artist you hope to become more efficient and be able to compartmentalize things, I guess. So, compartmentalizing the writing and then compartmentalizing the directing.

**John:** Susannah, you’ve written and directed. Is that your experience that you keep trying to write even though you’re in your directing mode, or do you break off?

**Susannah:** I think there’s an interesting tension in what you’re talking about because that spontaneity can sometimes yield the best piece of work in the whole piece. I don’t know, I find that kind of exciting. Like it could be a colossal waste of time, and it could be the thing that puts it over the edge, which is kind of interesting, you know. You feel like you’ve gotten better at knowing which it is?

**Richard:** Yeah. And I also, having ended up with like a three-hour rough cut that I want to open up a vein thinking about how to cut an hour out. It’s so hard. And sometimes my movies end up, they’re like algebra theorems sometimes in terms of like a science fiction logic and they’re really hard to sometimes deconstruct because without one component the whole thing doesn’t make sense. So, I don’t know. It’s trying to make room for those surprises, and make room for improvisation, but at the same time just try to always improve my level of discipline in terms of making sure that I’m focused on keeping everything in the correct timeframe. And that I’m not going to just end up with a lot of superfluous material.

But at the same time, you do want those surprises. You do want them, but this is also — excited to hear Cary talk, because when you’re dealing with something like television, boy is there time to play in television. Boy, is there just an extended canvas where you can have the shoe leather and you can have the quiet moments or the deleted scenes in movies end up becoming some of the best scenes in television, you know, because you have the time, the breathing room I guess.

**John:** Susannah, you’re just out of the editing room from shooting this TV pilot. So, are you able to sort of look at the stuff as a writer, or are you looking at this as the producer has to make the show going forward? What is that like for you?

**Susannah:** Because you go into it knowing you’re going to be shepherding it, you know, you’re going to be the authority on it all the way through. It felt like all of a piece, the work all felt like it was feeding into each other. But I ended up with exactly what you’re talking about. I ended up with a feature-length pilot initially and it took a lot to get it down into shape.

I think it’s partly because you’re looking ahead at what could be a pilot and it could be seven years. So, you’re thinking I’m going to have the time to play this stuff out. And that’s a real luxury. So, you’ve got the long view from the get go with television, you know.

**John:** In the moment as you’re shooting a scene, whether you’re the director or you’re the writer who is on the set, you’re watching the thing, I find the thing I have to keep reminding myself is what is the scene actually about. Because it’s so easy to get caught up in the mechanics of how you’re filming something. There’s that one little thing that’s annoying you that’s so easy to forget this is why this scene is in the story at all. And sometimes it’s a function of a writer, whether you’re the writer-director, or just the writer who happens to be on set, is the person who can remind everyone that this scene is important because of the thing that happened before and the thing that happens after.

Because when you’re just on the day shooting a scene it’s so easy to forget why that scene matters and why it exists. What the storytelling purpose is in that moment.

**Susannah:** I have a friend who is a writer-director and before she shoots anything she takes every scene, puts it on a little note card, punches a hole in it, and she puts them all on a little ring and attaches it to her hip. And on it she writes “the point of this scene is,” because as soon as you’re in it there are so many other factors and something can really excite you and she always has that and then she just rips it off when she’s done with the scene.

And I think it’s a really smart thing to do.

**Richard:** Well it’s also good to always remember what comes before and what comes after. I actually, I usually do a big diagram of the movie. I’m all about drawing diagrams. And a lot of it is the timeline of the movie and the characters and the sort of tension flow. It’s good to show the actors that and to have this diagram for the actors because you often have to shoot things out of chronology.

And so this is what happened to your character yesterday. This is what’s going to happen to your character tomorrow. So that you can keep them anchored in the timeline. And if you can have actually a visual reference, whether it’s something like she described — note cards on a belt, or a diagram of some kind — even if the actors can have some sort of visual access to the macro world of the movie and where they exist within that timeline. It can be really helpful. I mean, even going back. I remember working with Jake on Darko. That character goes through a really intense journey. And we had to shoot a lot of it out of sequence and do block shooting for the dinner table stuff, because we just had no time.

And so it was really important that I could just remind him. It’s like, you just saw the bunny rabbit, or you’re about to meet Grandma Death, you know. You’re about to have a schizoid attack. It was a lot to balance, but chronology and I have a friend who is always reminding me, and I do this in my scripts, to remind your audience what the chronology of your story is.

If your story takes place over a month, a week, a day, make sure that your audience understands the timeframe of when the story is taking place. That’s important.

**John:** I think one of the challenges we all face as we are going into production on our projects is the experience of reading a script is like the experience of watching a movie. Things move forward in time and it’s all very natural. You start here, you end up there. The experience of production classically is not that at all. And so you’re shooting things completely out of sequence. And so what you’re describing in terms of being able to talk with an actor about like this is what just happened, this is where you’re going to, you’re trying to give them a map for sort of this is what the journey is. Here is where we’re at on this journey, even though we’re sort of skipping around how we’re actually filming it.

And it’s a hard thing to appreciate until you’re there on the set and it’s two in the morning and they don’t understand sort of why this moment needs to be this moment. It’s a challenging thing.

You brought up TV. And we actually have two directors here who are fantastic TV directors. So, I want to ask those kind of questions. Let’s get them up here and send you back.

**Richard:** Excellent.

**John:** I want to invite up Cary Fukunaga from True Detective. Director of True Detective. Writer and director of Sin Nombre. Jane Eyre, which I just loved. So, thank you very much. This is such a weird space, because I know when we sit down we’re sort of hard to see, and so we’ll just stand. I also want to welcome up Peter Gould from Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. Peter Gould.

All right. Bigger canvases. Longer stories. Things that don’t have to fit into small boxes. And yet they’re shorter, they’re episodes, and there are constraints on how long a thing can be. As you’re approaching a Breaking Bad episode, you know what’s happened in the series before then, but you haven’t necessarily even seen that thing being shot. So, you have a sense of where things are going, but you have to prepare this thing that isn’t quite a moment yet. Can you talk us through prepping an episode of Breaking Bad and sort of when you come on board, whether it’s something you write, or something you’re just directing. What is the process for getting an episode together.

**Peter Gould:** Well, for me the process centers on the writer’s room. And it centers on a group of writers, some producers, writer-producers sitting around a table and asking that question: what just happened? What will be the result of that? And we often will have things that we want to have happen. We have goals. We have brainstorms. We have crazy ideas of things that we’d like to do, but ultimately we have to earn them. And so we want to be true to what’s just happened as much as we can.

So, in some ways, having the previous episodes or having the pilot is a lot like you’re little deck of cards. It’s like you have writing prompts that are embedded in the work you’ve already done. And you have writing prompts embedded in the things you know about your cast. And then when you start watching dailies you see things that work or don’t work. And those also become kind of writing prompts in their own weird way.

So, for us, and just the approach that we used, it’s very much about figuring out the story. It’s what Richard was talking about, too, is trying to figure out, trying to pre-visualize the episode as much as we can. And so sometimes we’ll ask ourselves, if we get stuck, it’s like what’s the first shot in this scene? What’s the transition between these two? Is this a new costume?

We try to think — and John, you and I met at USC and I was your teacher at USC. And it was all about making movies that weren’t necessarily dialogue centered, which a lot of people had a hard time getting their heads around. And for us, and the approach I like, is to really think about the story and to think about how little you can do.

As Susannah was talking about pilots, and I think the challenge with a pilot in a weird way for the audience, it only has one goal in my mind which is to get them to watch the next episode.

**Susannah:** Right. Come back.

**Peter:** Come back to the next episode. But on the other hand, there are a lot of impulses that people have. Let’s do everything. Let’s show the entire scope of what we’re intending to do, all in one 47-minute episode.

**Susannah:** Let’s take every character on a journey.

**Peter:** Yes.

**Susannah:** And get them to an endpoint.

**Peter:** Yes, go big moment, big moment. I’ve heard the phrase, thank god we never hear it with the folks that we’re working with, but I’ve heard the phrase “keep turning cards over.” Keep turning cards over. Keep making. Keep switching it up. And I think that’s actually antithetical to good storytelling to my mind. And that didn’t answer your question at all.

**John:** No, but it was a very good start to it.

**Peter:** It works out.

**John:** I want to switch over to Cary because you had the pilot-less experience. And so talk to us about True Detective and sort of your coming into the project and this wasn’t going to be made in a normal way.

**Cary Fukunaga:** Yeah. I was listening to Peter’s experience and I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like actually to have to — I would feel insecure just talking to the actors about how they accomplished some scene in a previous episode because there’s that communication, the one-on-one dialogue between a director and an actor. And, of course, in a longer running series the actors essentially know their parts. But there is a director there still for a reason.

So, like what if you’re saying something completely of, you know.

**John:** But it happens.

**Peter:** You wouldn’t do that. You would never say something off!

**Cary:** Never. No.

**Peter:** But also you have to have the freedom to, well, obviously this is my belief: you have to have the freedom to make an idiot of yourself at all times. So, but you had the experience of directing, was it 10 hours, eight-hour movie?

**Cary:** Eight hours.

**Peter:** How did you even — I just have to ask — I just came off of shooting one episode of television which kicked my ass by the way. I can’t even imagine how you would even prep. Is it just because you have enormous prep while you’re shooting? How did it work?

**Cary:** Basically what happened is the last three episodes weren’t quite ready yet to prep. And even if they were, you could really only prep about five hours ahead of time before people lose their capacity to retain all that information. And whether that be index cards with the intention of the scene written on it, or graphs, everyone sort of had their personal system to try to order the information. And since we’re dealing with a crime story, clues and character clues as well are essential, I mean, in terms of logically adding up.

And maybe it helped having one director in that sense that we didn’t have to educate four to eight other directors on exactly what was going on. It was just sort of one chain of communication. But then you had an overload of responsibility. And what ended up happening by the last half of the shoot is that we were scouting for locations for the last episodes before and after shooting, having production meetings at lunch. I would go home to the edit after those location scouts, after shooting, and then edit for a couple hours because we had to turn in episodes before we were done shooting. So, I was getting like four to five hours sleep a night, and then moving on to the same thing next day.

**Susannah:** So you had no break in production?

**Cary:** We had our “hiatus days.” Weren’t breaks. They were just getting caught up on —

**Susannah:** But you weren’t shooting for a couple days?

**Cary:** We only had about I’d say three or four hiatus days the whole time.

**Susannah:** Good lord.

**Peter:** Can I ask a geeky question? Did you cross-board? Did you shoot each episode complete? And then move onto the next one? Or were you at the same location shooting several different episodes?

**Cary:** We pitched the series to the networks as we’re going to shoot this like a feature. We’re going to shoot this like a long form story, so we’re going to cross-board locations. What that means, you know, producers like to hear that because that means they can shoot out an actor within a week or two, or shoot out a location and then you’re not kind of holding these places over the course of five/six months of shooting.

And I think everyone quickly realized that’s really impossible. So, I think this next season is not going to be shot that way. They’ll probably do it in blocks, like one or two episode blocks. Stop. Regroup. Go again. Which is the normal sort of humane way of doing it for all involved.

**John:** Well, it’s an opportunity for course correction, though, too. Because I feel like that must be one of the real challenges. When you’re making a show in a more traditional schedule, like Breaking Bad, if something is not working, you can see like well that’s not working, so we need to — could you? I mean, if you sense that like, wow, this character is not doing the thing we wanted to do, how quickly could you fix that? Or is that naÔve of me to think?

**Peter:** I’m trying to think of a situation where we had that.

**John:** Well, everything was perfect the first time. That’s the luxury.

**Cary:** Tell us about what didn’t work in Breaking Bad.

**Peter:** You know, it was a comet, lightning bolts. We were very lucky. But, you know, you do — sometimes you do. I mean, sometimes there’s an actor who is not available. Or somebody is not, or a location changes, or something. And then you have to do some frantic rethinking. But that’s the worst. Fortunately the producers, the physical producers, really protected us from having to do that an awful lot.

**Susannah:** Did you guys have the entire season mapped out before anyone went off to script?

**Peter:** No. I wish.

**Susannah:** No, right.

**Peter:** I wish. No, no, we were always — it’s television. The treadmill of — and on Better Call Saul, which is in some ways is more like True Detective in one sense is that we didn’t have a pilot. We shot the pilot and literally the day we wrapped the pilot we were shooting episode two. And Vince and I would talk and say, you know, if we had really thought about it, maybe we would have taken a little break there and cut the first episode so at least the other directors would have had something to look at.

And as it was they mostly had just us wind-bagging at them in a long meeting. Then they would go and make something wonderful.

**John:** I had friends who did a show for Netflix and the model for it was kind of clever in that they got a 13-episode order. But they shot the first episode and then they had three weeks off deliberately so they could cut it and if something wasn’t working right they could course correct.

**Peter:** Do this.

**John:** Do this. It’s a good idea.

**Cary:** Does that just mean firing people, or?

**John:** Yes. They would recast some people. If things weren’t working- and in some ways it allowed them to be bolder, because they didn’t have to make safe choices. They could make a bold choice and if a bold choice didn’t work there was a chance to fix it.

Another option I’ve seen is another 13-episdoe order, they shot the fourth episode first. And then they went back and shot the first episode figuring that they would understand the show better by the time it came back to shoot the first episode.

**Susannah:** What show was that?

**John:** It was one of David Goyer’s things. Da Vinci’s Demons I think did it.

**Susannah:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Which was an interesting choice, again, where that fourth episode, maybe some things aren’t going to work quite perfectly, but you’re going to know your show better by the time you’re actually shooting your pilot, or shooting the first episode that’s going to air theoretically. So, choices.

**Cary:** I would say if I were an actor or even from the director perspective, I would much rather start chronologically somewhere from the beginning, if the fourth episode was jumping back to some prior moment. Because I do think for the actors, even for like Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective, I was really pushing to have the interrogations as far back as possible. We were going to shoot them last, but we sort of needed them to start constructing episodes and make sure they were working.

But, there were so many things they were going to go through over five or six months of shooting that in the bubble that is production, which sometimes time moves at a completely different rate, and one month can seem like an entire year. The experiences you have do affect your performance on all parts. And I was still learning about how I wanted to shoot the show by the fourth week of shooting. So, I’d much rather start at the beginning, I guess. But I see, it’s an interesting experiment.

**John:** So, talk to us about writing these episodes, you were deeply involved in the creation of things. What is your conversations and with crew about intention. I find it fascinating to listen to how directors talk to people about what a scene is about. What kinds of words do you use to describe — after cut, what do you say to an actor? What’s your extinct for getting the thing to the next level? You, first, Cary.

**Peter:** You go.

**Cary:** Me first. I mean, it’s pretty intimidating the first time you’re working with like a Fassbender or a Judi Dench, you know, like what do I say to someone who has worked with the best directors in the last 50 to 60 years. Incredibly, you still find something to say. If you know what you want out of the scene, usually these great actors are delivering it. But there’s minor adjustments you can give them. Or even they want to hear something. They might prompt you for a question.

But typically I think with some of these sort of high caliber talent it’s all kind of conversations that took place ahead of time. And it’s even conversations that are worked out while we were blocking and rehearsing. So, once we’re shooting, I just kind of give them the space to recorrect themselves. They know what they want to get to and they know when they’re not quite getting there. So, we’ll just go again until I’ve got everything I want and they’ve got everything they need, unless obviously it’s not always that ideal obviously. But, you’re being pressed for time, but as much as we can get in that period of time.

**Peter:** I sometimes make them go first. How do you feel about that? And then sometimes, I’m not an experienced director, but as a writer-producer on the set, sometimes you end with a little huddle with the director and with the actor, and especially when I’m not the director I try to say the least possible directly to the actor. It’s just more respectful and it’s more useful, I think, for the director to do the directing.

But, you know, I’ll say to the director, isn’t there a little — usually, it’s interesting, because people, especially in television are so used to a headlong rush. They want to get through the moment so quickly. They’re used to scenes. And you’re working with feature folks, and maybe it’s a different deal. But in television, there seems to be this drum beat of going faster and faster. Oh, we don’t want to bore the audience.

So, frequently the work for me is saying isn’t there another moment there? Have we gotten everything out of that? And the actors will sometimes be — actually I had Robert Forster tell me, “You’re the only director I’ve ever had who told me to go slower.”

**Cary:** There’s like certain rules they say, like when you’re in film school you’re not supposed to say, you’re not supposed to give a line reading to an actor. You’re not supposed to say like faster or slower. But incredibly quite often that’s all you need to say. Like can you just do that a little bit slower, or faster often, because you’re like stuck in the edit with someone taking an incredibly long time to walk around a corner.

**Peter:** Yes!

**Susannah:** I heard an interview with Paul Newman at one point talking about that faster direction and he said whenever somebody says to me faster, I translate that in my head to fill the moment. If he’s asking me to go faster I’m not filling the moment. So he would then do a take in which he would fill every moment and find ones he hadn’t been filling. And he said inevitably somebody says cut, print. And you ask the script supervisor how long it was and it was longer.

So, you know —

**Peter:** That’s beautiful.

**Susannah:** Yes. It’s a really great story to hold on to.

**Peter:** And it’s something you notice when you’re cutting. When you’re cutting, the performance that is more specific is easier to cut. And you can watch with a wonderful, like a Bryan Cranston, or a Bob Odenkirk, there are just these natural places to cut. You can get the scissors in, you can see when things are resolved. You can see when the ideas cross their faces. And we’re so reliant on these guys.

**John:** Peter, you were talking about that you made television and he was making movies. And you’re both making shows that are broadcast on boxes, and yet do you perceive Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as television?

**Peter:** No. I see them as movies. I mean, we talk about it as being one thing, but it’s not — it’s interesting because there’s the sense that people have that if you didn’t work it out at the beginning, if you didn’t have the whole thing worked out from soup to nuts, the moment you started, that somehow it’s less legitimate.

And the truth is that I think all writing to some extent is an active improvisation. I mean, no matter what you’re improvising. So, it’s a question of when are you improvising. Does that make any sense? I’m not answering your question. I’m just going around it.

**Cary:** You were asking earlier about the writing hat and the directing hat and that’s all about preparation really. And Richard had said that you never quite take it off which is true, but then you also start feeling at a certain point like you’re neglecting other responsibilities. You’re noodling with the screenplay. And I found, I just did a film, we spoke about outside, Beasts of No Nation in Africa, and we had all kinds of complications heading in to production and then within production.

And I was having to write because actors were in jail or something. And I had to rewrite their roles, or parts in the script, and hoping that it all added up and not really sure till we got to editing that it did. So, the fluidity between the directing hat, the writing hat, and then having to make executive decisions was all happening at once. Ideally though you’re able to prep as much as you can ahead of time and then you can just focus on the creative aspect. But I guess that’s what makes film exciting, too, is all the problems.

**Peter:** Is it okay if I ask a question?

**John:** Ask a question.

**Peter:** Could you talk about your directing, specifically what kind preparation you do as a director? When you have a script and you’re working by yourself, what is your approach? What kinds of things are you doing with the script? What kinds of preparation do you do?

**Cary:** Gosh. I always start off with an outline, first off. It’s sort on the hero’s journey. And that’s my index card in a way because then I know my steps that are there and the scenes that are sometimes combos of things and sometimes individual scenes that mean something, or getting the character to a place.

Then once I’ve written the screenplay to switch into directing aspect, mainly I actually it’s in casting. And that’s not only casting the actors, it’s casting the heads of department who are going to help me bring this to screen. And that’s, you know, when you talk about reordering stuff, and stopping to reconfigure, it’s essential when you find weak links to get rid of them. Because you’re working as hard you can to get it done. And when you know there’s always one person or a couple people that are slowing down the process, and it’s an unfortunate thing.

It’s not always their fault. Sometimes it’s chemistry. Sometimes they’re just not right for the material. But, getting rid of those people so that everyone is sort of in line is one of the most brutal lessons you have to learn, I think, being a director. Otherwise, you know, the creative aspect of it, that inspiration, that spark, we’ve all had it since we’re children. Every human has. So, I guess it’s kind of learning to be discerning and harder.

**John:** Peter, can you talk about your preparation for an episode? So, whether it’s an episode you wrote yourself or someone else’s episode that you now need to go off and shoot, what is it like when you get the script and you have to figure out — what is your prep for that? So, obviously you’re going to meet with, there will be a first AD and you’re going to scout locations, but what is your actual work with the script to figure out how you’re going to do it?

**Peter:** Well, you know, we had the advantage that we have spent on any episode at least two weeks, sometimes as long as a couple of months breaking the episode in the writer’s room. and so we’ve talked through every single scene in great detail, annoying detail, navel-gazing detail.

**John:** Can you just describe the writer’s room? So is this all up on a whiteboard? Or how does Breaking Bad work?

**Peter:** Breaking worked and Better Call Saul works, really it’s based on a system I think that Vince Gilligan learned from Chris Carter on X-Files, which is it’s a very rigid, apparently rigid system where we end up with 3×5 cards on a corkboard. And I think it’s insane.

**John:** Is there a color code?

**Peter:** There’s no color code. They’re very neatly written. They’re somewhat comic booky descriptions of each scene and sometimes even a scrap of dialogue. Sometimes there will be little pencil notes in there. And there’s a certain amount of space you have for each act. We work, we think about acts and teasers. And because —

**John:** Because you actually had —

**Peter:** We shot the show for commercials. The show had commercials, which was very intimidating to me before I started because I had never, I think only once had I ever worked on a project that had commercial breaks, because most of my work before that had been cable movies.

But what I learned was that almost any well structured story, there are moments where you just wonder what the hell is going to happen next. Hey, that’s a good act break. So, it’s not as insane — it’s not as difficult or as ridiculous as it sounds. Although I will say I think once you get — is your show on ABC, Susannah?

**Susannah:** Yeah.

**Peter:** And how many act breaks do you have?

**Susannah:** Oh, it’s five acts. No teaser though.

**Peter:** No teaser. Oh, so we have a teaser and four acts. So, it’s —

**John:** Let’s talk through what that means, because I think some people might not know sort of what the terminology is.

**Susannah:** It means you break four times for commercials.

**Cary:** What’s the teaser mean? Like what are the wants of a teaser?

**Susannah:** Well, Breaking Bad a really great, like that little piece in the beginning that’s just intriguing enough to make you go, what?

**Cary:** Like a cold start?

**Susannah:** Yeah, yeah.

**Peter:** And then there would be the titles.

**Susannah:** Right. It’s the pre-title thing.

**Peter:** In the first couple of seasons there would be no commercial, and then hey, there was a commercial there. So, we had to pay the rent.

We had the advantage of talking it through in detail. And also, you know, there’s also the familiarity of knowing the DP, production designer, costume designer, because we’re working with those folks constantly, even when we’re in Burbank or Toluca Lake as we are now, there’s a constant interaction. We’re looking at every costume. We’re looking at props. We’ll look at ten different frying pans for every scene.

And the directors will be also. There’s a familiarity with the people you’re working with which is great. But, personally, my preparation, I just sweat over the script a lot. I keep wondering if it’s right. I keep going over it and finding little things that I want to change. And then I’m fascinated by trying to keep things as visual as possible. And I’ll do thumbnail sketches. There are sequences that I’ve actually worked with storyboard artists on which I love to do. If I had more time I’d do even more of that.

But you’re really racing the clock in television because you essentially have seven days, as a director you have essentially seven days of prep with the script and then eight days of shooting. And where the weekends fall become very, very important to you. You really hope that you get an episode where you shoot Friday and then you have the weekend.

**Susannah:** Two weekends.

**Peter:** You have the weekend to recover and kind of plan out some more. So, that’s — and casting, of course. But in a television series you have this stable of regulars and usually in some episodes you’ll have one or two roles that are very, very important. In fact, I just finished an episode where we — and I don’t want to give anything away — but the casting of this one character became so — who was not in that much of the series became so pivotal that that was my great anxiety. I was bugging — every time I was on the phone with our casting people and I said we need to see more people for this. When are we going to start seeing this guy?

And then, of course, we saw the guy and he was incredible.

**John:** On your shows, did you have the chance to do table reads where you could read the whole script with your actors? Cary, did you get that?

**Cary:** Yeah, we didn’t always have the whole cast there because we were doing it in New Orleans and some of the cast were having to travel. So, we had the local actors come in and read multiple parts. But for everyone that was sort of around and can be featured, we brought them in and we did a table reading of the first four scripts, right at the beginning, and then we did a reading — I can’t remember if we did the last four, or broke it up two more times.

**Susannah:** You did all four together?

**Cary:** Yeah.

**Susannah:** Oh, nice.

**Cary:** It was a long morning.

**John:** Talk to us, did things change based on that reading? Because especially when you have these two powerful actors and —

**Cary:** I can say yes. One particular role definitely changed after that reading.

**Susannah:** Because the casting was wrong or — ?

**Cary:** Yeah. The casting was wrong and HBO felt out of that reading that they’d seen enough to make a change.

**John:** So HBO is watching this, so it’s both for your benefit, but also so they can see what the show, a preview of what the show is, right?

**Cary:** Yeah. Script readings are funny.

**Susannah:** Everyone is auditioning all over again.

**Cary:** It’s auditioning, but sometimes tone is strange in a script reading. And it tends to lean towards the comedic and that could be really misleading. I’m always in favor of people seeing as little as possible until we’ve got a cut of something. I wasn’t even in favor of the casting choice. This isn’t a change, but it was okay. It worked out in the end.

**John:** So, for Better Call Saul, you had a table reading before the pilot? Do you do it for every episode? What happens on that show?

**Peter:** It’s just not logistically possible for us to do a table read for every episode because everybody’s shooting and they’re exhausted. And the guest cast often flies in like moments before their costume fitting. It’s just in time manufacturing. We will do the table read at the beginning, and you know, it’s interesting because I don’t feel — I hate to say it — I think it’s always fun and it’s a great crystallizing moment for everybody to get together and say, hey, yeah, there’s a show here and this is an interesting story.

But I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever learned — this is a terrible thing to say — I don’t think I’ve ever learned an awful lot from it.

**Susannah:** Really? I feel very differently. I feel like I, you know, I’ll hear a table read of something I’ve written and think how could I not have seen how false that rings. It’s a real bullshit detector for me because, you know, I know that I can do that. It shows me my flaws before you’re having to stand up, stop the whole crew for 15 minutes while you figure out to make it real, as opposed to fake.

So, I find them really helpful as a writer.

**John:** I find the most helpful thing about a table read is it’s evidence that the actors have read the whole script at least once, because otherwise they will honestly just read their part.

**Susannah:** No, but you know what, if they’re only living that part of it, sometimes that’s fine. If as the character you’re now aware of all that other stuff going on?

**John:** But there are some actors who will make sort of selfish choices because they don’t understand the world in which they’re living in.

**Susannah:** Oh, right, the tone and the demands of the piece.

**John:** So it gives them one chance for them to be able to see sort of what the whole thing is.

**Susannah:** It’s not all about them.

**John:** But your point about something being — there’s times where I’ve been forcing a lot, I’ve been faking something. It just isn’t there. And it’s so much better to have that realization or that conversation with the actor around a table than like with the whole crew watching.

**Susannah:** It’s a much cheaper place to fix it.

**Cary:** It’s too bad they don’t have like better voices for the Final Draft talk feature.

**Susannah:** Right. That would be really good.

**Cary:** Ways as like Terry Crews, you know, [unintelligible] turn left or right. And be like, Terry Crews like, “Interior Bus Station.”

**Susannah:** That’s actually a great idea for Final Draft.

**John:** I think there’s an app to be made with just Terry Crews doing that.

**Susannah:** They should cast that, man. You should be able to cast your Final Draft read, you know.

**Cary:** The Final Draft guys are around here somewhere. I’m going to pull them aside.

**Peter:** I think maybe Highland needs that feature.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll do it in Highland and Weekend Read. It will have a little read aloud feature. It will be good. It’ll be fun.

We actually, our next guests are here because they’re going to do a reading. So, maybe we should wrap this up and bring them up. But, guys, thank you so much for this and we’re going to have questions at the end, so stick around because we’re going to answer some more questions at the end, okay?

**Cary:** Okay. Thank you very much.

**John:** Thank you very much. Our next guests are here because they’re doing a reading tomorrow afternoon, I believe. So I want to welcome up Dan Sterling and Mike Birbiglia. Come on up. So, Dan Sterling here is a writer-producer-director. He did projects including the Sarah Silverman Program. I’ll make things up and tell us which ones are lies, okay? You did, let’s see, The Office?

**Dan Sterling:** True.

**John:** You did Breaking Bad.

**Dan:** That is a — that’s true.

**John:** You did Breaking Bad?

**Dan:** No, no. I just wanted to see if I could get a reaction. No, no.

**John:** But you’re here because you have a feature that you actually wrote that he is going to be reading it. Is that correct?

**Dan:** Yeah, that is true. And this is Susannah Grant.

**John:** Susannah Grant.

**Dan:** This is very exciting.

**John:** And this is Mike Birbiglia who has actually been on the show before. Yeah, we’ll introduce you anyway. So, Mike Birbiglia is a writer-producer-director-comedian-actor. Actor, that’s true. Can I say that you’re in that next season of that show?

**Mike Birbiglia:** Yeah. Orange is the New Black.

**John:** He’s in Orange is the New Black, next season. Fault in our Stars. Lots of things. But also —

**Mike:** I’m an avid listener to the show.

**John:** Yeah, he’s an avid listener.

**Mike:** And I wanted to say, and of course we won’t keep this in the final cut of it, but the show without Craig is phenomenal. I mean —

**John:** He’s essentially been —

**Susannah:** You’re advocating a permanent change?

**John:** The anchor that’s been dragging the show down this whole time.

**Mike:** And I just feel like today’s episode really lacks an antagonist.

**Susannah:** That’s rarely a good dramatic choice.

**John:** It’s all happy smiley.

**Mike:** And also I wanted to ask the gentleman who wrote and directed True Detective whether he enjoys the True Detective Season Two memes. They’re all over the internet all the time, or speculation about who is the cast of season two. Also, I want to urge Scriptnotes listeners to create a John and Craig True Detective Season Two.

**John:** We would be pretty amazing.

**Mike:** Does that already exist?

**John:** I’ve seen one of them.

**Susannah:** Really?

**John:** Where they pasted us together. Yeah. Because really good cop/bad cop. You know, there’s a lot of stuff going on between us. It would be fantastic.

**Mike:** Does he think it’s funny? Do you think those are funny?

**Cary:** Me?

**Mike:** All right, he doesn’t think they’re funny, even though he’s saying he does. I can see it in his face. But it’s all loving.

**John:** It’s all loving and it’s all good. So, you are a writer-director yourself, and you often have to direct yourself in a movie.

**Mike:** True. Yeah.

**John:** Is that good or bad? Are you a good director to yourself?

**Mike:** I’d like to think so. So much of what I believe in as an actor has to do with relaxation and just existing and living in a moment. And not doing acty-acting. And so I feel like if I were doing something in an extreme genre, or something that required a lot of acting heavy lifting, I don’t know how I would do that. But like I directed Sleepwalk With Me. And some other shorts and things. It’s not that hard because the type of acting I enjoy is sort of like just throw it away.

**Susannah:** Do you watch your takes on playback? Between?

**Mike:** I do, but only when I’m about to move on.

**Susannah:** Just to make sure?

**Mike:** Yeah. After five or six takes. Just like let’s just make sure we have one that looks good enough and then we’ll move on.

**Susannah:** How often do you go back after watching playback?

**Mike:** I’d say like one in three. Yeah.

**John:** So, something like Sleepwalk With Me, or even My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, those are based on things you’ve done a lot. So, you have the rare case of being able to — you performed these ideas before. You’ve been able to practice them in ways that writers normally don’t get a chance to practice their ideas.

**Mike:** Yeah. And also, and this speaks to sort of why I’m here with Dan this weekend, we’re doing a reading of his script called Flarsky, which is such a funny script. And one of the reasons I was interested in coming to do the reading, I love the process of work-shopping stuff through readings. And I feel the way that you were saying earlier. So, I’ve been having readings at my house all summer of a screenplay that I’m working on to direct my next film. And I always find I just — I’m hitting myself during the whole thing. Just going, oh my god, that rings so untrue. I can’t believe I even wrote that on paper.

And then I fix it. So, I was glad to be sort of an instrument for Dan’s reading.

**Susannah:** You can also hear the other thing, which is how did I not open that next door? You know, how did I not walk in that next room? There’s an obvious next step for this. And how didn’t I see it? I find them incredibly useful.

**Dan:** Although writers that are here today are so mature and disciplined, because I just dread table readings because I don’t want to have to change anything. I’m quite satisfied with all the things that I wrote and they’re all so precious. And I’ve always resented table readings. They were always super important, but I dreaded them.

**Susannah:** Do you love them after you hear them, too? Do you stay in love during the whole process? Or do you turn on yourself?

**Dan:** Well, I go through a process of denial where I assume that it was the performance that the actors are reading it cold and that they didn’t… — But, you know, basically whatever happens, every piece of criticism and notes from an executive or whoever that I’ve ever gotten just always makes me go and do what I think turns out to be something better. I just don’t want to. I’m lazy.

**Mike:** I also want to say because I know like I’m a listener to this podcast and I know a lot of the listeners are people who write and want to create things or do create things. And I think having readings like with your friends is one of the most cost-effective things you can do because they’re super fun. You order pizza. You hang out. You read a thing. And then you socialize afterwards and you learn. And it’s free.

And one thing about making movies is it’s so expensive. It’s like bleeding money. It’s literally like you got shot with a machine gun and you’re just bleeding thousands of dollars a minute. And you can’t even believe how much money it costs to make a movie.

And so having readings I think is a phenomenal thing.

**John:** So, you don’t like readings, and yet you came to Austin, Texas to have a reading of this script. So, tell us what this script is. That might be a useful setup.

**Dan:** I mean, I could not actually be more excited about this reading. It’s a hugely flattering thing to have a bunch of people come and read your thing for no money and probably at their own expense getting here.

Yeah, I wrote this, I’ve been a television writer and showrunner for a bunch of years, and then a few years ago I wrote this spec script, because I wanted to start to transition into movies. And so I wrote this script, and then Seth Rogan sort of picked it up and that began our relationship and we’ve since made another movie together that’s coming out in Christmas.

**John:** That’s The Interview, correct?

**Dan:** That’s The Interview with Seth Rogan and James Franco. It’s crazy. They go to North Korea and try to kill Kim Jong Un. I won’t tell you how it ends. But, yes, so —

**John:** Does it end in North Korea going to war with us? That’s the meme.

**Susannah:** I think it ends in some diplomatic challenges. [laughs]

**Dan:** Yeah, too much. I guess I hope not, though. I always just want my work to make an impact of some kind. Nuclear war seems like it would be very memorable. I would go down in the canon, which is super important.

**John:** That’s true. I mean, who’s going to remember anything else we do, but they’ll remember a war because millions of people will die.

**Dan:** In theory, yes.

**John:** If nothing else, you killed millions of people. That’s really the accomplishment.

**Mike:** You will be so remembered if that happens. People will be like what idiot thought it was a good idea —

**John:** Poking the bear.

**Dan:** I hope so. It’s possible that, you know, the screenwriter, how many people remember. Maybe they’ll just credit Seth to that.

**John:** [laughs] That’s true.

**Dan:** I’ve been saying that if death threats really start coming in and they only go to Seth and not to me, I’m going to feel very left out.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a danger. Tell us about Flarsky. So, what is the inspiration behind Flarsky? What is this movie that you’re trying to get going?

**Dan:** Well, so I just wanted to write something that was sort of partly personal and partly political, because that’s sort of what I’m attracted to. And it’s a screenplay about this very down and out newspaper opinion columnist who’s writing for like the equivalent of the LA Weekly or something and has maybe got some drinking and pill habits and stuff.

And he is encouraged by his insanely optimistic friend to pursue the most powerful and glamorous woman on the planet, the married Secretary of State, who would be a youngish, beautiful woman, and who is married to a senator. And when I was starting to write I was just trying to — for some reason I was thinking about, this is going to sound very pretentious, but I was thinking about Candide. Because I just always love this idea of like there’s this guy who grew up with a philosopher who told him every day these very positive things and all this for the best and the best of all possible worlds.

And then the rest of the book is nothing but rape. And they go out into the world and see that, no, everybody is being raped and enslaved and chopped into pieces. And so I wanted to have this sort of conversation between two best friends, one how is very pessimistic and one who is optimistic. And then in the movie the friend encourages the pessimistic friend to go and pursue the most glamorous, powerful woman on earth.

**John:** So, Mike, to get ready for this role you had to start drinking and pill-popping and really inhabit the character, right?

**Mike:** Yeah. I grew out my beard. That was it. And then I’ve just been drinking quite a bit, yeah.

**Susannah:** Austin is good for that, right?

**John:** It’s a good town for that. So, in doing this reading here, is this for kicks and giggles? Is it for you to learn more about it? Is it to build momentum for making this into a movie? What are the outcomes of doing a reading like this?

**Dan:** Well, I’ll report back to you on the outcomes if anything does come out. But I’m doing it because they asked.

**Mike:** The Black List, right?

**Dan:** Yes. This script got on the Black List. The Black List invited me to do it. And I’ve just never done anything like this because this is a reading to some extent to entertain. I mean, I’ve done table reads for television and stuff like that where there’s just a few executives. But this is actually totally sort of new ground for me. I mean, we’re going into our first rehearsal in a couple of hours, so I don’t know what to expect. But I did see a Black List reading a couple of weeks ago and it was really fun. I mean, it was a comedy and it was really well paced. And also the Black List told me that doing this — a lot of people who have done these Black List readings — these scripts have gone on to be made.

So, that was appealing. In this case, the script, it has maybe some attached cast, so it’s got producers and stuff and we’re sort of trying to figure out a director. So, I don’t even know whether this reading, other than to help me see where it’s working or where it’s not, I don’t know what other outcomes beyond that except my ego.

**Mike:** I was promised that the film would be made and that I would be the star.

**John:** [laughs] That’s good. There’s also, pizza was promised to you. And that’s a crucial thing, too.

**Mike:** A lot of things were promised and now I’m learning that it’s meaningless.

**Dan:** There is a real pizza thing in Mike Birbiglia’s work I’m noticing. I mean, one of this great quotes, or at least I think is about falling in love is like eating pizza flavored ice cream. It’s too much joy to process.

**John:** Fantastic. Because we have an audience here, I want to open it up for some audience questions. And so it can be questions for the people who are up here, the people who were up here before. It can be about television. It can be anything.

The only thing I would ask is it actually be a question. And so let’s just —

**Susannah:** I’m going to demonstrate. This is a question. Mike, much of your work has been work that you’ve done in another form. Do you have a hard time breathing new life into it when you turn it into a movie? How does that happen?

**Mike:** That’s a good question.

**Susannah:** Like that.

**Mike:** Oh, it was a question. Yeah, it is hard. It’s challenging. I mean, Sleepwalk With Me, it was a book, and it was a one-person show that I developed over about seven or eight years. And so it had grooves to it, where it had things where I’m like I know this will work. I know this will work. I know this gets a laugh. I know this has some kind of pathos or relate-ability to it.

And then you move to cinema and cinema is an entirely visual medium. And so it was very, very challenging. Actually, it was so challenging that right now the script I’m writing that I was just saying I’m doing reading of it in my house is completely from scratch because I wanted to build it from pictures this time.

**Susannah:** Because I would imagine chasing, I mean, it’s always hard to chase a laugh you got the night before, right? So, to do that after seven years must be really hard?

**Mike:** Yeah. And I have to say like one of the reasons I started writing these one-man shows was because I was a screenwriting major in school and then I got out of school and realized that screenwriting is a profession you can apply for. Isn’t that a wild realization? Like you can study it and then you’re like, oh, I guess there isn’t a job.

**John:** No.

**Mike:** And then I was doing standup comedy, I was pursuing that —

**Susannah:** Right, because that’s an easier —

**Mike:** That’s a job. And people do it. And I was working the door at a comedy club, and that’s a job too. And so then I moved to New York City. My writing professor actually said, from college, actually gave me advice. He goes you should just put on a one-man play because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s just you and two or more people in the audience.

**John:** Low thresholds.

**Mike:** Yeah. That’s the rule of theater is there has to be more people in the audience than on stage. And it’s a glass of water and a stool. And you know how to write a play and I taught you how to write a play. And so go do it.

And that’s how I started writing Sleepwalk With Me. And then from there I did My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. And from there I made Sleepwalk With Me, the movie.

But it’s funny because I listen to the podcast a lot. It’s very encouraging. But one thing that I feel like people, it’s hard to grasp sometimes is that for someone like me, I wanted to make a movie when I was 19 and I wanted to direct a feature when I was 19. I directed my first feature when I was 32. And I think that’s totally fine. I’m comfortable with that. But, yes, it’s good for people to know that that’s sort of marathon duration of how long things take.

**John:** All right. Some questions. I see a first hand was right there. Sir?

The question is how do you know that you’ve found a third act? How do you know you’ve found an ending to your story that is satisfying? Susannah, in writing your features, when do you feel like this is the ending? Do you know your ending before you’ve gotten there, or is it only the process that’s taken you to that point?

**Susannah:** I kind of know the destination. I hope I don’t know the specifics. I mean, I have kind of this rule of thumb with any scenes. I don’t think it’s done until I’ve written something other than what I went in to write, until I’ve surprised myself in it. And then like how do you know when it’s — I mean, it’s never really good enough, right? But then maybe it is. I don’t know.

You just kind of, it vibrates right or wrong within side you. I don’t think there’s a formula.

**John:** Peter, talk to us about it. You got to end the whole series. So, what is it like leading up to that thing and how early on in the process did you sense like this is where we’re going to end this show with these characters? This is how we’re going to get to that moment? Was there an ah-ha moment in the writer’s room where it all came together? Talk us through that, please.

**Peter:** Wow, I’ll try to remember it, because it’s all kind of a blur to be honest with you. It was a lot of pressure. You know what it is? I think the big thing is just to explore every freaking thing you can possibly think of. And that’s one thing — if there’s any method to doing this, it was just to try to think, okay, what if Walt is in… — Well, first of all, we have things that we’ve set on the show which we know that Walt’s got cancer. We know he’s going to have a giant machine gun. And we know he’s going to probably use the damn machine gun. And who is he going to use it on? That was a big question.

So, we really, I mean, it’s almost like just by talking the different possibilities through, eventually one just starts emerging and things start connecting to it. And you start seeing that that’s, okay, that character is, that’s going to help resolve that character’s storyline. And that’s going to — it all starts snapping together, but it doesn’t start snapping together until you’ve talked through everything you can possibly think of.

And so we had versions where Jessie was in prison and Walt came with a giant, the machine gun, and he blew away all these prison guards. And it went on and on and on. Just any bizarre idea you can think of was at least given serious — I think maybe that’s the trick is to give honest consideration to pretty much anything that occurs to you, no matter how freakish.

But then at a certain point it starts narrowing down and then you start feeling your way through it. But, you know, it’s also it’s easy for me to say because ultimately on Breaking Bad we were all talking through it, but it was ultimately Vince’s choice. And we knew that Vince was going to write and direct that last episode. And so we knew he was going to use the machine gun, so.

**John:** Chekhov’s gun.

**Peter:** Yes.

**John:** Another question? Her question is how do you become confident, which is kind of a valid question. Because I’ve been incredibly non-confident, especially as I was starting. And maybe we could sort of talk through those early awkward meetings. Because I remember my first water bottle tour of Los Angeles where you go and you have the general meetings. And it’s so incredibly awkward. And you feel like the imposter syndrome, where you feel like I don’t belong in this room and people are going to figure out that I have no idea what I’m doing.

That never went away for me. I don’t know if other people have that same experience. Dan Sterling, are you confident?

**Dan:** Well, you know, Thursdays at 4pm I have this standing appointment with a woman with a degree in psychology and I sit and I talk to her. And, I mean, I’m getting closer. Only because I’m having some success, but you know, I mean, I had my first show-running job, and it was completely absurd. I was like, I tricked them. I don’t belong here at all. And there’s nothing to do but sort of rely on that very cliché but true thing of, god help me for saying it, fake it till you make it.

And I think faking confidence is super important in a lot of areas in life and I’m probably doing it as I speak, but —

**Mike:** Yeah. I totally agree with Dan. I recommend this. If you haven’t listened to it, this Charlie Kauffman speech, is it BFI? The British Film Institute? And he just says this thing that I think most writers relate to which is that all you have to give to writing is yourself. And that’s — I mean, I’m paraphrasing it in sort of a terrible way, but he very eloquently says it. And that he doesn’t call himself a writer. He calls himself a person who has written some things and is going to try to write some more things.

**Susannah:** Yeah. I have this moment when I finish every script. I always look at it and think, god, who cares? And then you realize, well, everybody cares. Everybody cares about each other, basically, so just put yourself there. Don’t worry about it. Ignore that question. I mean, everybody has that feeling of like who cares about me and what I think, you know?

**John:** So, my first experience with you, Cary, was at the Sundance Labs and you were talking about Sin Nombre and how you had gone and done all this research. You were riding on trains with people. And I remember thinking like, wow, that kid is really, really brave. But that sort of carries through in the other stuff you’ve done. You’ve made sort of brave choices. Back then when you were making your first movie, did you have confidence? Were you faking it? Talk us though — these people want to make their first movie. What did it feel like and when did you feel like I belong to be behind this camera making this movie?

**Cary:** I’m going to have to agree with everyone else here that ignore that question because no one ever 100 percent feels confident in what they’re doing. And fixed income they do, they’re definitely lying. Or if they say they do, they’re definitely lying. And if they are really confident in what they’re doing, they’re probably not doing anything that deserving of confidence.

So, I think with Sin Nombre what happened was it was a bit by bit process moving into that story. I started off with a short film based on a real event that happened in Victoria, Texas, where a trailer filled with immigrants was abandoned and many of them died. And in doing research for that story I learned about the trains.

So, when I went down ultimately to do research in Mexico on the trains and travel with immigrants, at a certain point you start to accumulate experience. And then with the people you meet you start to feel a sense of responsibility then to tell that story, so maybe you can replace that confidence with a need to tell a story now that you feel the most equipped to tell it.

And definitely when I was making it, you know, with my crew members and educating them on the aspects of the journey that I knew about and, you know, as my production designer started to fill his room with references and pictures of what the gang areas would look like, or immigrant areas would look like, I felt pretty confident that I knew most of the nitty gritty details.

And maybe it just comes with doing the work as well. You know, it’s confident enough.

**John:** One more question. Who has a hand — we’re going to take over here. Gentleman?

**Male Voice:** The question is for Peter. You said that Breaking Bad feels like one big movie, but was it, or felt more cinematic. Was it each season felt like a movie, or the whole thing?

**Peter:** What do you think?

**Male Voice:** Each season?

**Peter:** You know, I think that’s absolutely legitimate. I always hoped — I remember early on talking to Bryan and saying, it was season two, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we have a story and there’s going to be a row of DVDs and it’s going to be a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it’s going to come to a conclusion.”

And Bryan was absolutely convinced that that was going to happen. And he was right. So, to me, it’s one story, but what makes it that. To me, cinematic, it’s visual. That’s really — that’s the thing that makes it most cinematic to me is just that it’s visual. And I’m standing here next to some incredibly visual filmmakers. So, I’m a little intimidated by that. But that’s really — that was the thing that appealed to me about the approach that we used on Breaking Bad is that we tried to tell the story using pictures.

And if it feels cinematic, I think ultimately that would be why.

**John:** Great. I want to thank our amazing guests for coming up here. This has been great. Thank you very, very much. Susannah, thank you very much for co-hosting this with me.

**Susannah:** Thank you for having me. I’m sorry I wasn’t as cranky as Craig.

**John:** You were awesome. So, a thing that Craig and I would normally do at the end of the episode is a One Cool Thing. And so do you have a One Cool Thing ready for us.

**Susannah:** I have a One Cool Thing and I’m not alone in this. But if anyone here does not have Birdman on your list, put it on your list. I loved it.

**John:** So, what is it about Birdman that is so great? This is the Michael Keaton movie. IÒ·rritu.

**Susannah:** It is, well, first of all I love the idea of it which is what does it take to regain your authentic self once you’ve sold it away. And how close to death do you need to come to find it back. Which, to me, is a great question to play around with. And then it’s everybody working at so the top of their game. Everyone involved in the movie is just firing off at such a high level. And you go to it and think, yeah, there are a million things wrong with the movie business right now, but if I can pay $12 and see this, there are also some things working right.

**John:** That’s fantastic. My One Cool Thing is Serial podcast, which probably a bunch of people here are listening to. It’s really good. And so it’s that kind of thing where like everyone says it’s really good and you’re like, uh, but no, it’s really, really good.

And the best part about it is you’re not that far behind. And so you can actually just download all the episodes and stick them in your queue. And I listened to half of it on the flight here to Austin. So, I highly recommend it. I love it. And as a person who makes a podcast, it’s so fascinating to see what the art form can become, because it really does feel like its own new thing. The same way that Breaking Bad is telling a story over all these episodes and it’s cinematic, it’s sort of cinematic podcasts, which is such a n unusual thing.

And so the fact that it’s happening live in front of us is kind of exciting to see.

On the topic of live and in front of us, I’m The Transitioner, so I have to always transition from one thing to the next. This has been great to have you guys here with us. I want to thank the Austin Film Festival. Let’s give them some applause here. You can find us at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We’re also on iTunes, so you can click subscribe there and listen to this.

And, thank you guys so much for coming. Thanks.

Links:

* The [Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Susannah Grant [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0335666/), and Scriptnotes episodes [144](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-summer-superhero-spectacular) and [145](http://johnaugust.com/2014/qa-from-the-superhero-spectacular)
* John’s picture of [St. David’s Episcopal Church](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/526058899796148224)
* Help is on the way at [writeremergency.com](http://www.writeremergency.com/)
* Richard Kelly [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JRichardKelly), and Scriptnotes [118](http://johnaugust.com/2013/time-travel-with-richard-kelly), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Cary Fukunaga [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1560977/)
* Peter Gould [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0332467/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/petergould)
* Dan Sterling [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1003839/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dansterl)
* Mike Birbiglia’s [site](http://birbigs.com/), and [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1898126/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/birbigs) and Scriptnotes episode [121](http://johnaugust.com/2013/my-girlfriends-boyfriends-screenwriter)
* Charlie Kaufman’s [BAFTA speech](http://guru.bafta.org/charlie-kaufman-screenwriters-lecture), and Scriptnotes episode [18](http://johnaugust.com/2012/zen-and-the-angst-of-kaufman)
* [Birdman](http://www.foxsearchlight.com/birdman/) is in theaters now
* [Serial](http://serialpodcast.org/) is a new podcast from the creators of This American Life
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Peter Rinaldi ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))